Work in progress — Interpreting elementary students´ advanced conceptions of engineering from the Draw-an-Engineer Test

The Draw-an-Engineer Test (DAET) is an age-appropriate instrument for collecting elementary students´ conceptions of engineers and engineering. However, analysis of drawings can be challenging. To make using the instrument more manageable for measuring the impact of engineering integration into classrooms, it is desirable to code each drawing with one of a limited set of defined conceptions. Four conceptions were identified in prior work with students with little to no engineering instruction: laborer, mechanic, technician, and designer. In this prior work, few students demonstrated the conception of designer. As engineering has been integrated into classrooms, more drawings could be coded designer but the drawings also represent a wider variety of ideas about engineering. This Work in Progress (WIP) will look at representative samples of student drawings coded with the designer conception to highlight the emergent engineering ideas.