Presenting a STEM Ways of Thinking framework for engineering design-based physics problems
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Investigating students’ thinking in classroom tasks, particularly in science and engineering, is essential for improving educational practices and advancing student learning. In this context, the notion of (WoT) has gained traction in STEM education, offering a framework to explore how students approach and solve interdisciplinary problems. Building on our earlier studies and contributing to ongoing discussions on WoT frameworks, this paper introduces a new WoT framework—Ways of Thinking in Engineering Design-based Physics (WoT4EDP). WoT4EDP integrates five key elements—design, science, mathematics, metacognitive reflection, and computational thinking—within an undergraduate introductory physics laboratory. This novel framework highlights how these interconnected elements foster deeper learning and holistic problem solving in ED-based projects. A key takeaway is that this framework serves as a practical tool for educators and researchers to design, implement, and analyze interdisciplinary STEM activities in physics classrooms. We describe the development of WoT4EDP, situate it within undergraduate STEM education, and characterize its components in detail. Additionally, we compare WoT4EDP with two contemporary frameworks—Dalal (2021) and English (2023)—to glean insights that enhance its application and promote interdisciplinary thinking. This paper is the first of a two-part series. In the upcoming second part, we will demonstrate the application of the WoT4EDP framework, showcasing how it can be used to analyze student thinking in real-world, ED-based physics projects.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it