Research from Dr Milorad Cerovac and Professor Therese Keane has explored the importance of language development in Technologies education.
“Language plays a vital role in how students learn to collaborate and communicate,” Dr Cerovac says. “However, there is little research into technical language and vocabulary development amongst primary school students.”
To better understand how young children use technical language, the researchers presented primary school students with hands-on engineering tasks where they were required to build models of increasing complexity.
“We found that language played a key role in students’ abilities to work collaboratively in building an accurate and correctly functioning model. As the complexity of the task increased, students appeared to lack the appropriate technical language to effectively communicate with each other.”
Dr Cerovac says this points to a broader issue with technical vocabulary and language development in primary schools.
“The Australian Technologies curriculum lacks guidance on how students should approach collaborative hands-on engineering projects.”
“We suggest that students and teachers would benefit from clearer guidance as well as a base set of terminology that would include words such as axle, buoyancy, constraint, gear, prototype, stability and torque,” he adds.
“Language plays a crucial role in practical technologies-based problem-solving activities, so we hope this research will help inform future iterations of the Technologies curriculum and lead to better learning outcomes for students.”
