Living With Contradiction: Cultural Historical Activity Theory as a Theoretical Frame to Study Student Engineering Project Teams
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Living With Contradiction: Cultural Historical Activity Theory as a Theoretical Frame to Study Student Engineering Project Teams Problem-‐based learning supports collaborative constructivist learning by encouraging students to engage in independent investigation of specific problems (Savery, 2006). Engineering disciplines tend to engage project-‐based learning opportunities that are characterized by longer engagement with more complex projects than traditional PBL(Bédard, Lison, Dalle, Côté, & Boutin, 2012), such as capstone projects or competitive project teams. Such extended, complex projects provide students with multiple opportunities to develop both technical knowledge and professional judgment – and multiple challenges that might jeopardize a project group’s success. This paper outlines cultural-‐historical activity theory (CHAT) as a theoretical lens to understand the challenges engineering PBL student groups face. Building from Vygotsky’s social constructivism, CHAT squarely situates human agency in sociocultural forces that shape and constrain the nature and execution of that activity. (Engestrom, 1987). By balancing human agency with rules, community and power concerns, contemporary CHAT highlights the situated nature of technical work and highlights multiple points of contradiction that must be negotiated and considered (Engestrom, 1999). Perhaps particularly disquieting for engineers, these contradictions are often highly social and political in nature and resist simple analysis or resolution. This paper grounds CHAT analysis in continuing research into the management practices of Formula SAE (FSAE) student engineering teams. The core activity of a FSAE team is to design, manufacture, test and race a small racecar in intercollegiate competition. Towards this goal, FSAE teams must learn to negotiate a range of organizational contradictions. FSAE teams must recruit and retain team members in a high-‐turnover environment. They must learn to operate within the constraints established by the competition, school administration and societal laws and mores. Teams may also strategically choose to share some information and collaborate with competitive teams for mutual gain. CHAT as a theoretical frame highlights these and other points of potential contradiction and allows for sharing of experiences to help determine best practices in a variety of team contexts. References Bédard, D., Lison, C., Dalle, D., Côté, D., & Boutin, N. (2012). Problem-‐based and Project-‐ based Learning in Engineering and Medicine: Determinants of Students’ Engagement and Persistence. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-‐Based Learning, 6(2). doi:10.7771/1541-‐5015.1355 Engestrom, Y. (1987). Learning by Expanding: An activity-‐theoretical approach to developmental research. Helsinki: Orienta-‐Konsultit. Engestrom, Y. (1999). Activity Theory and Individual and Social Transformation. In Y. Engestrom, R. Miettenien, & R.-‐L. Punamaki (Eds.), Perspectives on Activity Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Savery, J. R. (2006). Overview of Problem-‐based Learning: Definitions and Distinctions. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-‐Based Learning, 1(1), 9–20.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".