Science reforms in national K-12 science education standards position engineering as a discipline that can be productively integrated into science curricula. This integrated approach presents science as foundational to engineering and engineering as a tool to contextualize and reinforce science ideas such that students come to develop understandings about the natural and engineered worlds. To better understand if integrating engineering into science classrooms achieves the promise described in national reforms, we explored how elementary school students came to understand what is expected of them when asked to engage in an integrated science and engineering unit and whether their understandings represent epistemologically productive ways of integrating the doing of science and engineering. For this purpose, we examined video recordings, transcripts, and classroom artifacts of tasks from a 9-week unit contextualized in an engineering challenge in which students engaged in activities to explore, design, and build simple circuits devices to develop explanations of energy movement in a circuit. Our findings suggest that an integrated approach may be more problematic than promising; while at times students took up integrated tasks as opportunities to wonder about, question, and explore materials that sparked their interest, their framing of the tasks did not align with the vision for integration called for in current reform documents.

中文翻译：

---

和谐还是脱节？：认识论框架及其在综合科学与工程活动中的作用

国家 K-12 科学教育标准中的科学改革将工程定位为可以有效地融入科学课程的学科。这种综合方法将科学作为工程和工程的基础，作为一种工具，将科学思想置于情境中并加以强化，从而使学生能够对自然和工程世界有所了解。为了更好地了解将工程融入科学课堂是否能实现国家改革中描述的承诺，我们探讨了小学生在被要求参与综合科学与工程单元时如何理解对他们的期望，以及他们的理解是否代表了认识论上的生产方式科学与工程的结合。为此，我们检查了录像，成绩单和来自 9 周单元任务的课堂工件在工程挑战中处于情境中，在该挑战中，学生参与探索、设计和构建简单电路设备的活动，以开发对电路中能量运动的解释。我们的研究结果表明，综合方法可能比有希望的更有问题；虽然有时学生将综合任务作为思考、质疑和探索激发他们兴趣的材料的机会，但他们对任务的框架与当前改革文件中要求的整合愿景不符。我们的研究结果表明，综合方法可能比有希望的更有问题；虽然有时学生将综合任务作为思考、质疑和探索激发他们兴趣的材料的机会，但他们对任务的框架与当前改革文件中要求的整合愿景不符。我们的研究结果表明，综合方法可能比有希望的更有问题；虽然有时学生将综合任务作为思考、质疑和探索激发他们兴趣的材料的机会，但他们对任务的框架与当前改革文件中要求的整合愿景不符。