Over several months, responses in the students’ workbooks
were repeatedly reviewed, coded, recoded, and
subsequently refined. The coding of these responses was
commenced by the first author, shared with the second
author for checking, and where needed, revised with
mutual agreement. Member checks were made with the
research assistants and the teachers where necessary. As
an example of our recoding, the number of sketches and
templates students produced was included initially but
was subsequently removed as it did not appear to have a
bearing on the students’ solutions, despite Song and
Agogino’s (2004) findings with adult designers. Our recoding
also resulted in some minor adjustments to the
design levels that we identified in the students’ sketches
after repeatedly checking these against levels.
We conducted iterative refinement cycles of analyses
of the group and class transcripts for further evidence of
students’ learning (Lesh and Lehrer 2000). Through repeated
analyses of the transcripts, we could identify examples
of students engaging in the design processes
indicated in Fig. 1 and how their movement through
these processes appeared to facilitate a problem solution.