Abstract
This study examines technology-enhanced STEAM learning among fifth and sixth grade students in one set of in-school makerspaces. It focuses on the learning of one set of meta-disciplinary skills, spatial skills. Prior research has shown these skills to be relevant for STEAM achievement, but they have been underemphasized in our schools and in the literature on learning through making. Informed by a distributed cognition perspective and using a combination of qualitative categorical coding and interaction analysis, this study provides a learning sciences approach to studying spatial thinking and learning. Analyses show that during making activities students engaged in frequent and diverse spatial thinking with a variety of social and material resources and that the sociomaterial contexts of different making activities facilitated different types of spatial thinking. They also show that spatial thinking developed over time and led to problem-solving insights.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 168-175 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Journal | Proceedings of International Conference of the Learning Sciences, ICLS |
Volume | 1 |
Issue number | 2018-June |
State | Published - 2018 |
Event | 13th International Conference of the Learning Sciences, ICLS 2018: Rethinking Learning in the Digital Age: Making the Learning Sciences Count - London, United Kingdom Duration: Jun 23 2018 → Jun 27 2018 |
Keywords
- Interaction analysis
- Makerspace
- Mixed methods
- STEAM
- Spatial thinking
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Computer Science (miscellaneous)
- Education