Investigation of the decision-making processes of fourth grade students in engineering design based activities

With the changes brought by technology, it has been important to catch up with today's digital age, so individuals need to have 21st-century skills such as entrepreneurial, critical thinking, high communication skills and the ability to follow the innovations. Our curriculum, which was reformed by taking into account the needs of the society, was also updated in 2018 in order to provide individuals with these skills. With the program change, the standards in the units were structured on the basis of science, engineering and entrepreneurship, and called with the title of "Science, Engineering and Entrepreneurship Applications" in the Curriculum. With this addition to the program, it is expected that the engineering design process will be carried out for the solution of a problem that students may encounter in daily life, based on the topics covered in the units. With this research, it is aimed to examine how primary school fourth grade students make decisions in the activities developed based on the Engineering Design Process (EDP) steps, which are prepared within the scope of the 'Lighting and Sound Technologies' unit of the Science course, through classroom discourse. The holistic multiple case study design, which is one of the qualitative research methods, was used. The participants consisted of 4th grade students in a public school in the central Aydın province and reached through using purposeful sampling. During the implementation process, which lasted for 4 weeks in total, small study groups were formed in the classroom. Lessons were prepared using 5E model with integrating engineering design process. The data was collected through audio recordings of small groups, worksheets suitable for EDP, interviews with students, and researcher observation notes. Analysis of discourse was performed on the discourse-based data emerged through the audio recordings, and the data obtained from the interviews and worksheets were used together for the purposes of data triangulation. As a result of the study, it was observed that although there were common situations in each group, group-specific behaviour and decision-making processes took place. In the decision-making process of all groups, the influence of the roles, positions and influence of worksheets in the groups stand out. It has been observed that the groups refer to the material knowledge when choosing the appropriate material for the product they will design to solve the problem, but students are insufficient in justifying this information. In addition, some groups used the games of chance to make decisions when they are undecided. Based on the results of this study, recommendations for the researchers and teachers were provided.