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Getting the Picture: Developing Intrinsic Motivation to Self-Regulate Engineering Documentation Practices in a High School Drone Design Challenge

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Title: Getting the Picture: Developing Intrinsic Motivation to Self-Regulate Engineering Documentation Practices in a High School Drone Design Challenge
Language: English
Authors: Rachel N. Bonnette (ORCID 0000-0001-5498-244X), Monica L. Miles (ORCID 0000-0003-0006-1842)
Source: Journal of Engineering Education. 2025 114(3).
Availability: Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us
Peer Reviewed: Y
Page Count: 19
Publication Date: 2025
Sponsoring Agency: National Science Foundation (NSF)
Contract Number: 1735945
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Research
Education Level: High Schools
Secondary Education
Descriptors: High School Students, Student Motivation, Engineering, Documentation, Aviation Technology, Design, Cooperative Learning, Teamwork, Success, Failure, Student Projects
DOI: 10.1002/jee.70019
ISSN: 1069-4730
2168-9830
Abstract: Background: Engineers must learn to document their process to communicate effectively in teams--a skill that calls for knowing "how" and "when" to capture information, as well as the self-regulation to continually engage in this practice. Motivation to self-regulate requires that students be motivated to complete a goal and see value in the practice toward accomplishing that goal, raising the question of how students' experiences while participating in an engineering design task impact their motivation to self-regulate their documentation practices. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the sequence of events that lead to changes in students' "motivation to self-regulate" documentation practices to support their design process. Method: We use Organismic Integration Theory on the phases of intrinsic motivation to self-regulate as a lens in a case study to capture the collective growth of a high school engineering design team collaborating over the course of a semester-long drone design challenge. Results: Findings demonstrate that both "successes and failures" played an intimate role in increasing intrinsic motivation to engage in self-regulatory practices, as increased motivation to see their drone fly pushed students to question the role of documentation in the design process. Conclusion: When high school students work on intrinsically motivating projects with opportunities for both successes and failures, they can learn to self-regulate documentation practices. We discuss the implications for instruction and research in turn.
Abstractor: As Provided
Entry Date: 2025
Accession Number: EJ1478486
Database: ERIC
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  Value: <anid>AN0186992457;6m401jul.25;2025Jul31.06:28;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0186992457-1">Getting the picture: Developing intrinsic motivation to self‐regulate engineering documentation practices in a high school drone design challenge </title> <p>Background: Engineers must learn to document their process to communicate effectively in teams—a skill that calls for knowing how and when to capture information, as well as the self‐regulation to continually engage in this practice. Motivation to self‐regulate requires that students be motivated to complete a goal and see value in the practice toward accomplishing that goal, raising the question of how students' experiences while participating in an engineering design task impact their motivation to self‐regulate their documentation practices. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the sequence of events that lead to changes in students' motivation to self‐regulate documentation practices to support their design process. Method: We use Organismic Integration Theory on the phases of intrinsic motivation to self‐regulate as a lens in a case study to capture the collective growth of a high school engineering design team collaborating over the course of a semester‐long drone design challenge. Results: Findings demonstrate that both successes and failures played an intimate role in increasing intrinsic motivation to engage in self‐regulatory practices, as increased motivation to see their drone fly pushed students to question the role of documentation in the design process. Conclusion: When high school students work on intrinsically motivating projects with opportunities for both successes and failures, they can learn to self‐regulate documentation practices. We discuss the implications for instruction and research in turn.</p> <p>Keywords: co‐curricular activities; collaboration; documentation; interest; self‐regulation</p> <hd id="AN0186992457-2">INTRODUCTION</hd> <p> <emph>The Sky team had waited weeks for this moment; after learning about the Rescue Drone Project, collaborating to come up with a preliminary design plan, purchasing supplies, and enduring the long effort of following a confusing video to assemble their drone, the time had come for Dronarella's first test flight. Each student on the team got into position in the high school gym, ready to watch the first flight from a safe distance and eagerly hoping to see it rise into the air. Excitement filled the gym as the drone turned on, motors whirring. The drone rose as its control turned on, careening slowly off the gym floor and beginning to hover. The team waited with bated breath to see it fly, entranced as the drone hovered higher and higher. Thrilled gasps quickly turned to shrieks of horror as the drone beelined into the gym wall with a deafening crash of smashing plastic. Dronarella was tangled in nets along the bleachers, propellers grinding horribly as the drone fought pointlessly to free itself and take flight once more</emph>.</p> <p> <emph>The Sky team collected the remains of their drone, each student going through different forms of grief—shock, disbelief, frustration, despair. They sat with their battered drone in their workspace, a hush falling over the team as they tried to accept what had happened and move forward. There were broken propellers to be replaced, motors to be reattached—if only they could remember how it went together in the first place</emph>.</p> <p> <emph>One student looked up from the wreckage of their drone to the others and asked in a desperate tone</emph>, "<emph>Did anyone get a picture of the drone?</emph>"</p> <p>This opening vignette, taken from fieldnotes and transcripts in this study, illustrates a key example of a team of high school students displaying deep interest in an engineering design challenge, only to shift from <emph>triumph</emph> to <emph>grief</emph> when their drone crashes instead of flying. This moment has everyone on the team contemplating their documentation practices—maybe considering for the first time that semester that a practice their instructor insisted they learn might have value for reaching the goal of seeing the drone fly. The design team in the vignette above was part of a high school physics class that participated in a semester‐long team challenge to design and build drones to compete in performing mock rescue tasks. Students were required to create documentation of their design and design process. This project offered the potential for students to learn collaboration and communication skills vital for any engineer.</p> <p>Written and visual communication are a core component of the skills engineering students must learn (ABET, [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref1">1</reflink>]; Bucciarelli, [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref2">7</reflink>]). In engineering practice, communication takes many forms: writing, sketching designs, drawing up diagrams, symbols, labels, and so on (Passow & Passow, [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref3">27</reflink>]; Riemer, [<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref4">29</reflink>]). In long‐term engineering collaborations, communication must be recorded and labeled in a way that is useful over time; here, we collectively refer to this as <emph>documentation practices</emph>.</p> <p>Although co‐curricular activities often encourage interest in STEM (Bonnette et al., [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref5">6</reflink>]), garnered interest is not expected to immediately produce students' intrinsic motivation to self‐regulate (Ryan & Deci, [<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref6">33</reflink>]). It is the objective of this study, therefore, to elucidate the events that shape students' willingness to self‐regulate their documentation practices. We present a case study demonstrating three major shifts in a team's collective motivation to document, following key events that impacted their interest in a goal and views on the utility of documentation.</p> <hd id="AN0186992457-3">Self‐regulation in documentation practices</hd> <p>Research on long‐term, hands‐on projects (e.g., participation in a national competition for drone design) shows that they can be powerful experiences for helping students to learn core engineering skills (Memarian & Olewnik, [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref7">24</reflink>]). Communication and collaboration skills in engineering call for opportunities to practice using effective techniques, build routines, and determine what is effective, something arguably best done through experiential learning and feedback (Gilbuena et al., [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref8">14</reflink>]; Memarian & Olewnik, [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref9">24</reflink>]). However, participation in hands‐on projects, whether co‐curricular or in school, does not ensure (a) that students learn these core skills and (b) that these practices transfer to other settings. For a practice to transfer from a high school project to useful practice in higher education or the field of engineering, students must ultimately "assimilate and carry out the behaviors on their own, in the absence of immediate contingencies or surveillance" (Ryan & Deci, [<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref10">33</reflink>], p. 180). In other words, hands‐on projects are valuable to developing skills but do not guarantee students' willingness to learn and continue engaging in a practice over time, for which motivation to self‐regulate is essential (Ryan & Deci, [<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref11">33</reflink>]).</p> <p>Learning to document effectively is a process that continues to develop over the course of engineers' careers, starting with education (Goodwin, [<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref12">15</reflink>]). Documentation—including notes, diagrams, and other artifacts produced to record the design process—is an important part of supporting collaboration and assessment (Denayer et al., [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref13">12</reflink>]; Underwood, [<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref14">40</reflink>]). The designs students sketch form a basis for discussion about their design and the reasoning for their choices (Aurigemma et al., [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref15">3</reflink>]). Documentation can also provide a basis for exploring gaps in knowledge at all grade levels (Hertel et al., [<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref16">17</reflink>]; Lewis, [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref17">22</reflink>]), teaching students to talk and think like engineers.</p> <p>In many studies involving engineering design tasks where documentation is an expectation, the focus of research is assessment (Chew & Matusovich, [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref18">8</reflink>]; Underwood, [<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref19">40</reflink>]). Students are therefore often assigned to create documentation and regularly prompted to use it and eventually learn from it. Because of this, we know some of the ways in which students come to see value in documentation of their process in hindsight or the value that instructors ascribe to it—like getting feedback, celebrating successes, and teaching (Keune et al., [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref20">20</reflink>]). But understanding how they come to self‐regulate documentation practices without external motivators enforcing self‐regulation is a different question altogether. It is self‐regulation motivation that tells us whether a practice has become ingrained and may more likely transfer beyond the lifetime of the study.</p> <hd id="AN0186992457-4">Conceptual framework: Linking interest and Organismic Integration Theory</hd> <p>Organismic Integration Theory (OIT) explicates the process of internalizing self‐regulatory behaviors, like students remembering and choosing to record notes, label photos, and keep a good record of their work. This theory maps stages in the transition from entirely external motivation (e.g., rewards or grades) to more internal motivation (e.g., personally valuing the behavior to achieve a goal) (Ryan & Deci, [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref21">32</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref22">33</reflink>]). Ryan and Deci map these stages on a continuum from (i) external regulation, (ii) introjected regulation, and (iii) identification to (iv) integrated regulation. Although an individual may not shift from one stage to another in the order presented—if they experience a particular stage at all—the continuum represents this transition from external to internal motivation. In this study, we wanted to understand both (a) how these different stages may manifest for students' self‐regulation for documentation, and (b) how experiences that influence interest in engineering can better explain the group's shifts between OIT stages.</p> <p>At the first stage, <emph>external regulation</emph>, outside factors drive student regulation: performance depends on continued rewards or punishments. <emph>Introjected regulation</emph> is slightly more internalized and involves a student feeling that their sense of self‐worth is related to the performance of the behavior; guilt motivates regulation. <emph>Identification</emph> is the stage at which students begin to see the value of the behavior as it relates to the learning goal, such as internalizing that writing out math problems more frequently results in correct answers. The final stage, <emph>integrated regulation</emph>, describes the point at which a student has fully internalized a behavior's value to accomplish a goal. Importantly, transitioning from a stage of <emph>external</emph> to <emph>integrated</emph> self‐regulation requires that students both (a) be motivated to complete a goal and (b) see the value in a behavior for accomplishing this goal. This means that for students in this study to demonstrate the <emph>identification</emph> or <emph>integrated</emph> stages, they must be motivated to build a drone that can fly—and see that documentation practices can support this goal.</p> <p>We know that when students are interested in a goal, they are more likely to be intrinsically motivated to perform the self‐regulatory behaviors that support that interest (O'Keefe & Linnenbrink‐Garcia, [<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref23">25</reflink>]). One of the benefits of hands‐on, long‐term activities like the drone design challenge is their strength for sparking and sustaining <emph>interest</emph> in engineering and other STEM fields (Bonnette et al., [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref24">6</reflink>]; Crowley et al., [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref25">10</reflink>]). Interest is a form of intrinsic motivation that can inspire short‐term or long‐term engagement with a practice due to experiences that spark positive feelings repeatedly toward a certain activity or topic over time (Hidi & Renninger, [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref26">18</reflink>]). Interest can be a powerful intrinsic motivator for students to want to achieve a learning goal (Harackiewicz et al., [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref27">16</reflink>]). Intrinsic motivation to achieve a goal is a powerful ingredient of OIT, as motivation to self‐regulate a practice is much less likely if students' motivation to achieve the goal wanes with time. Goals that are only extrinsically motivated may not be sustainable (e.g., disinterest in seeing the drone fly but fear of failing the class if they do not complete the project) (Lee et al., [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref28">21</reflink>]).</p> <p>When it comes to self‐regulation of documentation practices, ideally, students' interest in achieving an engineering goal increases with engagement in the project. Increased interest in the goal might then increase their interest in performing behaviors that will lead to successful accomplishment of the goal (Ryan & Deci, [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref29">32</reflink>]). Eventually, students would become aware of the benefits of self‐regulating documentation practices as one of the behaviors that helps them to accomplish this goal. This might then result in increased engagement in self‐regulation during the project (i.e., students no longer require prompts to remember or want to document). Integrated self‐regulation could then lead to transfer to other contexts (Ryan & Deci, [<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref30">33</reflink>]).</p> <p>But learning is not as simple as fostering interest. We must first answer the question: <emph>How do students 'become aware' of the benefits of self‐regulation of documentation practices toward an engineering goal</emph>? How do they learn to value it? When students do not understand the purpose of capturing their process, they may struggle or refuse to do so (Tosh et al., [<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref31">39</reflink>]). Failing too often may discourage motivation (Wigfield & Cambria, [<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref32">41</reflink>]). However, "failures" that spark a shift in understanding or design are critical for learning (Eskreis‐Winkler & Fishbach, [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref33">13</reflink>]). In engineering design projects, <emph>failure</emph> is an important part of testing and iteration to identify potential flaws and account for them (Jackson et al., [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref34">19</reflink>]). In either case, students run the risk of repeating errors, missing flaws, or taking significantly more time to pick up where they left off previously without documentation to support their practice. But if students do not encounter any problems during the design process, or are unaware they encountered any, they may never come to value documentation as essential to their design process.</p> <p>We hypothesized, therefore, that failures during the design process would also be essential for students' learning to self‐regulate documentation practices over time, but that failures must be tempered with successes to assure students that the goal is still possible, and for the task to remain interesting (Bandura, [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref35">4</reflink>]). It is important, then, to understand a full sequence of events that impact a group of students' level of interest in the goal of making the drone fly while <emph>also</emph> motivating them to self‐regulate their documentation practices. If the task is not challenging or complex enough, documentation may not be valued by the group. If it is too difficult, students may become discouraged and disinterested in the original goal. By understanding this process, we can design for future students' learning.</p> <hd id="AN0186992457-5">METHODS</hd> <p>In this exploratory case study (Stake, [<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref36">38</reflink>]), we used interviews, observations, and documents produced by students and instructors to understand how students transition from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation to perform self‐regulation of documentation practices. In case studies, the objective is <emph>transferability</emph> rather than generalizability: that is, the ability to see whether the patterns observed may arise in other situations and settings. Thus, rich descriptions form the core of this methodology, aiming for detailed understanding of events that informed observed patterns with sensitivity to local conditions (Cousin, [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref37">9</reflink>]). To enhance reliability, we triangulated data from multiple sources (interviews, fieldnotes of observations, transcripts of video, and documents), which provided a more comprehensive and balanced view of the research problem. Additionally, we ensured clear and systematic documentation of data collection procedures to allow for replication in similar contexts. Interpretations were also triangulated against surveys and class work‐product (see Table 2) as well as member‐checking throughout the study to support validity. Results are presented as a case study about a team whose roles included collectively producing meaningful documentation throughout the course of an engineering design project.</p> <hd id="AN0186992457-6">Participants</hd> <p>This study was conducted in a mid‐level high school physics class in a higher income suburban community in the eastern United States. Students were primarily juniors and seniors, participating in teams within the class for course credit in a regional drone design competition. This study focused its analysis on five students in one team, because of inclusion criteria: (i) evidence of collaborative participation in design practices; (ii) evidence of engagement with documentation practices from multiple team members; and (iii) evidence that video‐recording was minimally disruptive or welcomed by the team. While the other teams in the class engaged in some discussion of documentation within their group, the Sky team regularly collaborated and discussed their process openly.</p> <hd id="AN0186992457-7">Rescue Drone Project</hd> <p>The Rescue Drone Project (pseudonym) was a challenge offered throughout the United States to encourage high school students, both in and out of schools, to gain interest in engineering through a team search‐and‐rescue drone‐design task. The project took course over the spring semester, ending with a competition at the end of April 2019. The Sky group, the focal team of the study, had to design a drone that could be piloted over an obstacle course in a gymnasium and perform "rescue" tasks. Student roles and prior experience with documentation and design are described in Table 1.</p> <p>1 TABLE Breakdown of team member roles and documentation contributions.</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead valign="bottom"><tr><th align="left">Pseudonym</th><th align="left">Appointed team role</th><th align="left">Demographics</th><th align="left">Documentation practice</th></tr></thead><tbody valign="top"><tr><td align="left" valign="top">Samantha<graphic href="" /></td><td align="left" valign="top">Primary documenter</td><td align="left" valign="top">White, she/her</td><td align="left" valign="top">Initially rarely documented, but eventually focused on documentation and reminded others to share information for documentation. Mainly took notes in Google Docs and uploaded pictures or videos.</td></tr><tr><td align="left" valign="top">Nick<graphic href="" /></td><td align="left" valign="top">Team leader</td><td align="left" valign="top">Black, he/him</td><td align="left" valign="top">Created diagrams to problem‐solve drone design challenges.</td></tr><tr><td align="left" valign="top">Billie<graphic href="" /></td><td align="left" valign="top">Fundraising</td><td align="left" valign="top">White, she/her</td><td align="left" valign="top">Frequently talked to the group about improving visual labels and diagrams, took photos to assist documentation, and modeled documentation techniques for the team documenter.</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Eliot<graphic href="" /></td><td align="left">Programming, fundraising, co‐pilot</td><td align="left">Latino, he/him</td><td align="left">Occasionally assisted with documentation and produced descriptive, detailed accounts.</td></tr><tr><td align="left" valign="top">London<graphic href="" /></td><td align="left" valign="top">Programmer</td><td align="left" valign="top">White, she/her</td><td align="left" valign="top">Worked on developing diagrams to record information during testing.</td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <p>Teams were graded both on their ability to design and prototype working movement, seeing, and claw systems, as well as on the documentation created throughout the project with support from the teacher and mentors. They were responsible for fundraising, research, design, ordering parts, prototyping, testing, and iterating. Students were permitted to work privately during project days (in the classroom, library, and conference room, 2–4 days a week) and visit the gym or tennis courts as necessary to test drones. They used Google Docs to record and share their documentation with the physics teacher at the end of the project. Students also used multiple other formats to share information and collaborate, including texting and email, which were not included in this study. Students chose their own roles, which naturally evolved throughout the project. Students received advice about documentation practices from their teacher and the first author, as well as occasional designing and engineering advice from their teacher and a professional engineer. The first author provided additional advice about materials and construction and occasionally pointed out issues of clarity in diagrams or documentation.</p> <hd id="AN0186992457-8">Data collection</hd> <p>The first author observed and collected more than 30 hours of video using four cameras and an iPad to record notes, photos, and audio recordings. Students rotated between a library space with tools and materials, requiring the cameras to be moved with the group at times. The Sky team preferred the conference room, which was a large room with tables and whiteboards. The first author followed the Sky team to collect richer field notes and be as unobtrusive to other teams as possible. Cameras proved distracting to students at times, given the small space students occupied and the inherently obtrusive nature of being recorded, but they became more comfortable with it over time, even helping to position the camera to ensure that their work was adequately captured. The presence of the cameras ultimately encouraged the team to think about the value of video‐recording their own progress and test flights during the testing phase.</p> <p>The first author transcribed video recordings taken over 25 class sessions to add observational notes and relevant dialogue to field notes. This resulted in a document of approximately 50,000 words. Student‐generated work product was also used to help triangulate findings during analysis, including graded assignments and teacher‐conducted interviews (see Table 2). In addition, students took pre‐ and post‐study surveys administered by the first author during their physics class using the Qualtrics online survey platform. A subset of data from the larger survey was used for this analysis, focusing on responses from the five students pertinent to documentation and design. The teacher was also interviewed about the Sky team's progress, documentation skills, and learning throughout the study to further validate findings.</p> <p>2 TABLE Graded checkpoints during the Rescue Drone Project (RDP) semester.</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead valign="bottom"><tr><th align="left">Date</th><th align="left">Item</th><th align="left">Doc. grade</th><th align="left">Type</th><th align="left">Scored by</th><th align="left">Format in dataset</th></tr></thead><tbody valign="top"><tr><td align="left">January–April</td><td align="left">Team Documentation Reflection</td><td align="left">Yes</td><td align="left">Students were asked to keep a running record of documentation on Google Docs</td><td align="left">Teacher</td><td align="left">PDFs downloaded from Google Docs archive</td></tr><tr><td align="left">February</td><td align="left">Preliminary Design Review</td><td align="left">Yes</td><td align="left">Students submitted pre‐build plan for making drone, including budget and simple blueprints</td><td align="left">RDP officials using a rubric</td><td align="left">Scanned rubric with grade and feedback for each group</td></tr><tr><td align="left">March–April</td><td align="left">General Reflective Interviews</td><td align="left">No</td><td align="left">Teacher conducted class interviews, individually asking students to reflect on "Measuring What Matters" growth</td><td align="left">Students self‐graded</td><td align="left">Video recordings by individual students</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Competition (April)</td><td align="left">Final Grade</td><td align="left">Yes</td><td align="left">Groups were graded on budget, functionality of drone, and documentation portfolio using rubric developed by physics teachers in past RDP years</td><td align="left">Teacher</td><td align="left">Scans of graded group rubric</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Post competition (April)</td><td align="left">Final Reflection</td><td align="left">No</td><td align="left">Students wrote final essays based on assignment rubric reflecting on growth during the RDP project</td><td align="left">Teacher</td><td align="left">Numerical grade for each student; electronic copy of reflective essay for most students (and all Sky students); original assignment prompt on file</td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <hd id="AN0186992457-9">Coding and analysis</hd> <p>Coding was an iterative process that took place during and after the 4 months of data collection. Preliminary findings were summarized in analytic memos and reviewed to refine the coding process throughout the whole analysis. The transcript and video fieldnotes were initially structurally coded to refine the data selection to only those passages relevant to the documentation practices (e.g., removing from analysis social conversations unrelated to the project or self‐regulation). Level 1 codes descriptively identified patterns related to documentation practices (Saldana, [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref38">35</reflink>]). Level 2 process codes were then derived a priori from OIT (Deci & Ryan, [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref39">11</reflink>]), as shown in Table 3.</p> <p>3 TABLE Codes.</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead valign="bottom"><tr><th align="left">Code</th><th align="left">Definition</th><th align="left">Example</th></tr></thead><tbody valign="top"><tr><td align="left">1. External regulation</td><td align="left">Documenting as a result of external motivators like grades, feedback, or reminders rather than achieving the goal</td><td align="left">The team's documentation assignment calls for a diagram or picture, and thus the team's documenter takes a photo of a drone part.</td></tr><tr><td align="left">2. Introjected regulation</td><td align="left">Documenting in response to guilt or internalized feelings of a need to comply rather than achieving the goal</td><td align="left">Not observed.</td></tr><tr><td align="left">3. Identification</td><td align="left">Documenting in reaction to events where the team sees documentation could have helped achieve goal</td><td align="left">The team scrambles to find pictures of the drone configuration after it breaks during a test flight.</td></tr><tr><td align="left">4. Integrated regulation</td><td align="left">Documenting intentionally in anticipation of achieving the goal</td><td align="left">The team develops a system for recording adjustments during iterating upon and testing the drone.</td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <p>The results of the coding procedures were summarized in a matrix to identify trends in documentation practices and motivation for self‐regulation as they were mapped against the dates of the project. Table 4 in the Results section represents a simplified version of this matrix.</p> <p>4 TABLE Timeline of Sky team design activities from the months of January to April.</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><tbody valign="top"><tr><td valign="top"><graphic href="" /></td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <hd id="AN0186992457-10">Positionality</hd> <p>The first author is a neurodivergent Learning Scientist (Latinx, female‐presenting) and assistant faculty whose expertise focuses, in part, on understanding how diverse ways of communicating, knowing, and being influence learning and collaboration. Their analysis thus emphasizes non‐verbal and often abstract forms of communication. Initially, students were shy about being video‐recorded and had many questions about the purpose of the study, but the Sky team came to trust the first author after they helped the team overcome challenges, such as when the Sky team believed their kit had been stolen. In addition, the first author was a graduate student at the time of data collection, shaping their student‐centered perspective and likely the students' willingness to be candid during data collection.</p> <p>The second author is a Black scholar whose work focuses on community engagement in STEM. She is particularly invested in elevating and honoring student‐centered perspectives, especially in communities typically excluded from representing STEM engagement. In this case, this includes emphasizing the value of students' voluntarily taking up practices to communicate STEM understanding in ways that honor their experiences, like depicting how they endure failures through illustrative vignettes.</p> <hd id="AN0186992457-11">RESULTS</hd> <p>Over the 4 months of the study, as students' documentation practices (both representing and reflecting) shifted between stages of OIT, three general trends emerged demonstrating a relationship between the way students thought about the goal and self‐regulation of documentation practices: complying, reacting, and relying. Introjected regulation was not observed, either because of the internal nature of tying self‐worth to self‐regulation or because the shift from external to identified was so abrupt that there was little room for this stage in between. These trends are mapped below against the task stages of the project and summarized in Table 4. Table 4 also shows that, as students progressed from the conceptual phases of design to building and testing, they naturally incorporated more purposeful documentation practices into their routine.</p> <p>As shown in Table 4, students produced limited documentation during early planning stages, created in response to external motivators such as a graded checkpoint or instructor feedback. When parts became available to play with and the drone was no longer purely conceptual, students struggled while trying to create documentation but had come to see the potential value for their own goals. During the testing and iterating phase, students were both focused on the goal of making the drone fly and had integrated self‐regulation into their practice. Each change in the tasks of the project corresponds roughly to a shift in self‐regulation. We unpack the events that led to these significant shifts for the group's self‐regulation in three major stages.</p> <hd id="AN0186992457-12">External regulation: Complying without comprehending</hd> <p>When in the <emph>external regulation</emph> phase, the team did not demonstrate interest in the goal of drone design, nor did they demonstrate an internalized value of self‐regulating their documentation practices. Only the beginning and end of the project called for a graded checkpoint to review students' documentation, as these were the only phases in which grades as extrinsic motivators might reliably prompt students to work on their documentation practices. The project was designed for voluntary participation outside of school, and thus was designed to prioritize fostering interest over assessment.</p> <p>Previous instruction about documentations did not transfer to students' practical skills or motivation to self‐regulate their documentation practices. Prior to the beginning of the project, students in the Sky team were surveyed and asked to define the purpose of documentation. Each student successfully gave a written response that conveyed a recollection of what their teacher had told them about documentations' purposes. Billie, for instance, wrote, "It allows other people to easily follow your process as well as allows you to go back and see things you have already done or in case of damage/error know how to fix it" (Billie, Pretest Survey).</p> <p>Despite this wrote knowledge, the team did not collect and document useful information at the early conceptual stage of the project. When they collaborated to create preliminary documentation for a graded checkpoint, they all expressed confusion about what they should record and what its purpose would be. Billie, the same student who described in the survey how documentation could be used to "see things you have already done," remarked, "I just wish instead of (non‐consecutive days) we could [work] on like, a Tuesday and a Wednesday so we wouldn't forget what we did."</p> <p>Consequently, students produced documentation that was ambiguous and shallow and based on their limited understanding of the assignment's guidelines and the purpose of written engineering designs. They used text or pictures randomly, regardless of which was the most effective format for conveying their process and decisions. For instance, students primarily used their documentation to jot down a hyperlink for ordering a part or for rewatching an instructional video to assemble the drone rather than recording notes so they would not need to rewatch the entire video. This resulted in saving little time; rather, students spent time on documentation <emph>and</emph> needed to spend the same amount of time reviewing and interpreting the video, which had both limited instructions and was in a language the students could not understand, resulting in a need to use translated captions. It might have saved significant time if students had written down the instructions as they understood them, allowing them to review possible misinterpretations in the original build of their drone or else saving time on rebuilds to avoid the need to interpret the video demonstration a second time if their initial build had been correctly assembled.</p> <p>At this point in time, students primarily expressed trepidation or confusion about participation in the project itself, rather than being motivated to complete a goal. The challenge represented a departure from ordinary physics class activities, and although some members of the team were already interested in engineering, most of them had not previously thought of building or designing a drone. Prior to ordering parts, the majority of their activities comprised research, a task that was conceptual and sometimes stressful because the students were uncertain whether they understood the scope of the project and could complete it.</p> <p>The project called for two extrinsic motivators intended to prompt students to document; first, a documentation reflection the physics teacher created that was worth a few points toward their grade; and second, a Preliminary Design Review designed by the challenge officials, graded by judges outside of the class. The reflection was designed to help students consider the quality and value of their documentation practices in preparation for the official first review. In early February, the physics teacher told the teams to submit their current documentation, saying this was an "early‐on self‐reflection point." Students would have to show "the evolution of team ideas/build via ideas, analysis, pictures, video, sketches, models, resources through entire process." Up to that point, the team had some sketches and notes. When London told the teacher, he prompted reflection: "Would you have a lot at this stage of the game?" The team nevertheless scrambled to assemble pictures, but expressed uncertainty about what to photograph and why they were doing it. London sketched a part they planned to use in the design, an unlabeled and somewhat ambiguous shape, and explained aloud that she was doing so in an effort to comply with the graded assignment. Samantha and Billie worked together to describe the group's process for choosing which parts to order in their documentation portfolio. They wrote down the basic requirements of the project, which they had been asked to do in class, but ultimately included little information about their design or research, for example, paraphrasing requirements rather than explaining how to design it.</p> <p>The team received a 7/10 on this first check‐in grade, and the teacher noted specific gaps in their documentation practices: "Each time you meet you should have a good representation of your work documented by date. This includes pictures, videos, and links to your thinking process and ideas. What you have currently is limited." This was discouraging and confusing to the team, who wanted a good grade and resolved to improve their documentation to obtain a better grade. Obtaining good grades was the team's only goal at this point. Billie reflected that "Even if we got a bad grade, I'm proud of us on our documentation, even though we didn't have a lot of pictures. I think it's pretty and detailed."</p> <p>The Preliminary Design Review was the next major documentation grade (see Table 2). In addition to other competition parameters, the team's Preliminary Design Review submission was required to include the following:</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> System description: Thorough system description included.</item> <p></p> <item> System drawings: Very clear system drawings along with electrical schematics.</item> <p></p> <item> Schedule: Rational implementation schedule included.</item> </ulist> <p>The team was upset that the requirements for documentation were even more detailed than they had interpreted from the reflection check‐in. They reflected that they did not currently have all the information necessary for the Preliminary Design Review in their documentation. In particular, they had not been keeping a regular log of progress, despite earlier feedback from their teacher about this requirement. The team collectively color‐coded sections to label which team member would have what responsibilities on the Google document, collaboratively adding what information they had documented up to that point into the Preliminary Design Review template.</p> <p>The team once again expressed confusion about the Preliminary Design Review's request for images, given that they had no actual parts to photograph, and at the first author's suggestion, Billie and Samantha used a whiteboard in the room to draw a rough sketch of their drone design. Samantha reflected on what a design should look like, saying, "Should I be drawing altogether what it is going to look like?" Billie took the lead, telling Samantha how to label the diagram and modeling the process for her. The initial attempt at diagramming included relatively little information; of the three systems the team was expected to design for (i.e., capturing video, controlling movement, and an appendage to grab objects), the students had only accounted for the body of the drone itself and demonstrated limited understanding of the working mechanisms of the design (Figure 1).</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/6M4/01jul25/jee70019-fig-0001.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMNXb4kSepq84yOvqOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="jee70019-fig-0001.jpg" title="1 The Sky team's first whiteboard diagram." /> </p> <p></p> <p>Samantha took a picture of the diagram and uploaded it to the Google Docs folder, where it could be added to the Preliminary Design Review.</p> <p>The team submitted their documentation late with a partial design and received only 12.5/20 points. The team lost significant points for all three categories (System description, System drawings, and Schedule), obtaining only 25% of the possible points for system drawings or schedule. This reflected the team's lack of understanding about how the drone was meant to function and how much time they would need to fully test and build it. The team also received handwritten comments from judges on their Preliminary Design Review submission that echoed criticisms of the lack of information in their design documentation, for example, "Need more specifics on dropper design. What concept have you downselected from your research + brainstorming?" After this point, there were no graded documentation checkpoints prior to the final grade, and the team stopped creating documentation altogether until the next stage in developing documentation practices.</p> <p>Ultimately, this stage demonstrates that purely extrinsic self‐regulation unrelated to an internalized goal resulted in both poor self‐regulation and limited learning. Extrinsic motivators, such as graded feedback, could prompt the team to document even when they were uncertain about wanting to participate in the project. Experiences of friction, such as tension from the difficulty of understanding documentation guidelines, surprise about the poor feedback, and constructive feedback on areas to improve, could potentially help them to learn to improve their documentation process. But students were not yet invested in the goal of seeing the drone fly, did not internalize how documentation could be used practically to support their work at this conceptual stage, and lacked the experience to understand what parts of their design they should be recording in a particular format. Instead, they had the frustrating experience of trying to comply with the task of providing some form of documentation. This in turn resulted in unhelpful documentation for their process, which reflected the group's limited conceptual understanding of drone design and the engineering design process.</p> <hd id="AN0186992457-14">Identification: Reacting to failure</hd> <p>The identification stage, where connections between a goal and self‐regulated behavior started to emerge, began only after the team had access to parts to begin building their drone. At this point, extrinsic motivators like grades and assignments no longer prompted the team to document. Instead, engagement with drone parts began to spark interest for the team. New problems and experiences then pushed the team to think about what purpose documentation might serve for their process toward achieving a goal they were just starting to internalize. At this stage, too, the team began to react to problems, reminding them once again in a much more visceral way that documentation could help them achieve their goal.</p> <p>The first major event occurred when students believed the drone kit was stolen by another team in the school. They received an email that parts had arrived, but could not find their kit. After learning the drone was not stolen and that the kit that had arrived belonged to another team in the school, the Sky team nevertheless recognized the need to safeguard their inventory. Billie remarked, "After Friday, I'm a little paranoid about losing stuff." She came up with a comprehensive system to inventory all the parts they purchased, commenting, "I feel like we should be writing down what comes in each little bag. I know that sounds stupid, but ..." The team supported her idea, and she worked with the team's documenter to inventory the parts. When the drone's main body was fully assembled for the first time, they took pictures of the team holding their drone and Billie reflected that it would be "hard for someone to argue" again that the drone was not theirs, thanks to now having photo evidence. Here, the goal was not so much <emph>to make the drone fly</emph> as to prevent loss of the parts they needed, but this event nevertheless marks the first time the team intentionally sought out documentation to achieve a goal.</p> <p>During the build process was the first time the team demonstrated excitement for the drone project. They built it for the first time after hours of collaboration and work, watching confusing videos without instructions to determine the proper method to build the drone. Their excitement was evident in the way that they posed for social media pictures with the drone, sharing with friends, and went so far as to name their prototype Dronerella. Billie and Eliot, in particular, expressed pride in their accomplishments. When they finished cable management (zip‐tying all cables down to the arms of the drone) and several team members had taken videos of the drone to share it with friends, Billie personified the drone, saying, "She was kind of a mess before ... She wasn't an organized queen, but now she's an organized queen." But all the photos taken were sent through Snapchat, an app that is designed not to save the photos shared. It was in this moment that they lamented not saving the photos properly to be submitted with their final documentation portfolio.</p> <p>The third major event to change their thoughts toward documentation was the first test flight. The team was still learning to anticipate problems documentation could solve and often forgot documentation was valuable to their goal. They were increasingly interested in seeing the drone fly, now that it had moved from a conceptual to tangible stage, and they were starting to believe in their ability to successfully achieve the competition goal. The team flew their drone for the first time in the school gym, with only the team's documenter recording video of the test flight. As demonstrated in the vignette in this study, the drone spun rapidly out of frame and crashed into a wall. It was damaged and needed to be rebuilt. As the team sat around a table, mourning their loss, they tried to work through the disappointment by identifying a solution and asked who might have information on what it looked like before the crash. They scrambled to look through order forms and links and even took pictures of the broken parts to collect a list of materials to reorder, but the team lacked the forms of documentation that would have been most useful for rebuilding, for example, labeled photos and diagrams. They had only photos of the wreckage afterward (see Figure 2).</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/6M4/01jul25/jee70019-fig-0002.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMNXb4kSepq84yOvqOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="jee70019-fig-0002.jpg" title="2 "Dronerella the Drone" has suffered damage during the first flight test, missing propellers and having snapped wires." /> </p> <p></p> <p>The excitement of almost seeing the drone fly had shown the team that they were all invested in the goal of making it fly. This was the first time the team deeply recognized the need to be able to consult their documentation to iterate upon the drone, not only to copy a video configuration but to come up with theories about how to improve and repair the drone. When the first author prompted the team to reflect on problems that occurred during the flight test, the team said they were uncertain what controller movements had corresponded to the flight test results. Nick came up with a documentation solution, volunteering to video‐record the controller and drone together for every test thereafter. The identification stage of their self‐regulation was a relatively short period in the team's documentation process, as the major incident had taught the team quickly to prioritize amassing more documentation to prevent future problems and failures.</p> <hd id="AN0186992457-16">Integrated: Relying on routines</hd> <p>The integrated self‐regulation stage of the team's motivation to document came quickly after the experiences of the initial build stage. As they moved to testing and iterating, much subtler instances of problems, questions, and successes drove the need to document or improve upon documentation. By this point, students had a strong desire to see the drone fly (motivation to complete a goal), having almost succeeded that first day in the gym and experiencing emotional attachment to Dronerella, while valuing the practice of documentation for their learning and progress. The competition was also fast approaching, increasing the intensity of urgency to complete the goal efficiently.</p> <p>As the students began rebuilding after the crash and moved on to daily testing and iteration, the team began anticipating the need to document the reasons for changes to the drone design. They did not want to rewatch the full video to reassemble their drone, so they made diagrams; they realized the video configuration did not make the propellers spin the right way, so they made diagrams comparing the configuration they thought was correct to the one they thought the video mandated (see Figure 3).</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/6M4/01jul25/jee70019-fig-0003.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMNXb4kSepq84yOvqOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="jee70019-fig-0003.jpg" title="3 The team uses more sophisticated diagrams to compare instructional video to their drone, indicating whether propellers should be connected to a particular color wire to rotate clockwise or counterclockwise." /> </p> <p></p> <p>It was no longer necessary for extrinsic motivators outside of the group to encourage self‐regulation of documentation practices, as the team voluntarily engaged in them on a regular basis and reminded each other to collaborate in the process. The students both consulted their documentation regularly and discussed ways to improve their communication practices within documentation. Documentation was primarily used to rebuild, record the results of test flights, and discuss theories about how to modify the drone before going back to the basement hallway to perform a series of test flights. When students became motivated to efficiently improve the drone for the sake of seeing it fly, they developed routines. These included communication practices like color‐coding and labeling the drone parts to make photos and videos more interpretable (see Figure 3). The team became accustomed to documentation practices such as using the long, stationary whiteboards on either side of the conference room to make lists and diagram their thought process. They had the option of multiple classrooms to work in, but routinely stayed in the room with the same whiteboards to be able to continue working with the diagrams they had drawn, adding notes and modifying the configuration as they learned new things about the drone. They also worked to brainstorm more effective ways of labeling information with each other, their teacher, and the first author; the first author and teacher often modeled new strategies for documenting or labeling information before students adopted them into their routine.</p> <p>The team's documenter, Samantha, took her duty more seriously by this point, delegating work as needed, iterating upon her note‐taking process, and even reminding Eliot to take notes on his own process when working alone. When the documenter was absent, the team recruited Eliot to take on her duties. He surprised everyone, producing a detailed and emotionally reflective capture of the team's process (as excerpted from the team's Google documentation):</p> <p>Pressure of the competition is getting to us and the drone is yet to fly. We decided to remove the legs to take off excess weight. We noticed that the drown wants to spin just when we tested the motours [<emph>sic</emph>] so we brainstormed possible solutions and are still working through that. A problem that came whenever we removed the legs is finding a new spot for the payload dropper as well as the camera. The payload droppers must be vertical to function properly, the camera must be able to see the ground and it can't go in the same spot as we first thought. Removing the leg seemed to help the drone, we decided to do a test flight before class ends.</p> <p>(<emph>Sky Team Documentation</emph>)</p> <p>Individual team members began to recognize that they did not always know how to interpret information in others' diagrams or notes, after the absence of the person primarily responsible for recording a dial's position on the drone during test flights. London had represented the position of an unlabeled, ambiguous dial as a circle with a line through it, with no clear orientation in relation to the drone, recording whether the drone veered left or right when they attempted to fly it straight after adjusting the dial (a series of potentiometers). Students attempted to read and interpret the diagrams and identified the need for improved documentation systems, making their notes more specific and complex as they continued testing. This resulted in a whole‐group discussion trying to identify how best to represent the position of a dial, resulting in consulting the teacher and first author. The teacher suggested the students use what they eventually called "clock talk"—referring to the dial in terms of 12 O'clock and so on. It took a while for the team to collectively understand how to use this in their communication practices, but they were eager to learn better ways to communicate, since they were stuck at the same stage of testing. For several weeks, they adjusted propeller positions, wire connections, and dial rotations in the interest of stabilizing the drone. Their eagerness to make the drone fly by competition persisted through failures and they continued working up to judging. In the end, they did not make the drone fly successfully, but were more interested in engineering than they had been before the competition and had come to fully internalize the value of documentation.</p> <p>At the final documentation grading checkpoint, the team had a substantial quantity of documentation to produce a final portfolio, and worked together to translate their work‐product into their submission. As a result, they received a perfect score on the documentation portion of their project grade (Figure 4).</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/6M4/01jul25/jee70019-fig-0004.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMNXb4kSepq84yOvqOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="jee70019-fig-0004.jpg" title="4 Sky team's final grade on the documentation rubric." /> </p> <p></p> <p>The routine use of documentation practices motivated by a specific learning goal highlights the team's collective shift toward integrated self‐regulation of documentation practices. Post‐test surveys taken at the conclusion of the project revealed a practical, rather than rehearsed, view of documentation across all students' responses. When asked to simply describe how they used documentation in the project, the team's documenter qualified her response, saying, "It was very important to document things that we did in order to look back and help further our drone building process. An example of this was when we had to change the propellers we looked through old photos and videos to see how they need to change" (Samantha, Post‐Test Survey). Although not asked whether documentation was important, she explicitly noted that it was and further explained why.</p> <hd id="AN0186992457-19">DISCUSSION</hd> <p>Many small practices make up the professional skills that build future engineers, but not all of them are easily learned in a traditional classroom setting. This study demonstrates the potential of a long‐term, hands‐on engineering design project for simultaneously engaging students in motivating projects while also teaching students to self‐regulate their documentation practices. It further depicts the sequence of events that led up to shifts in self‐regulation for a diverse team of high school students working together to design a drone. We explored how these shifts coincided with different stages of the design process, as well as a series of apparent successes and failures, both moderating students' eagerness to complete the goal of seeing the drone fly and the value they saw in documentation toward this goal. This bears implications for the transfer of these findings to other contexts, directions for future research, and lessons for teaching practices for fostering self‐regulation of documentation practices.</p> <hd id="AN0186992457-20">From complying to relying</hd> <p>OIT defines intrinsic motivation to self‐regulate as a combination of (a) student investment in a learning goal and (b) valuing self‐regulation of a practice toward this goal.</p> <p>First, we address the shift in students' goals. In this study, we saw that a transition to intrinsic self‐regulation corresponded to phases of the project itself. In the early conceptual stage of the project, students appeared to have low interest in the assigned goal. They expressed concerns and confusion over the expectation that, in a traditional physics class, they would need to engage in a complicated engineering design challenge. Several members of the team had no experience with or prior interest in engineering and design. It was not until the team had parts in their hands and had the success of building a seemingly completed drone—even going so far as to name it and pose for photos for their friends—that they demonstrated investment in the goal itself. This aligns with extensive research suggesting the motivating impacts of hands‐on, engaging experiences for engineering (Memarian & Olewnik, [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref40">24</reflink>]; Simas Filho et al., [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref41">36</reflink>]).</p> <p>Hands‐on experiences and small victories served as moments that build students' self‐efficacy (belief they can succeed in learning or mastering a skill) and bolstered intrinsic motivation to continue engaging with a practice (Bandura, [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref42">4</reflink>]). Even the moment of <emph>failure</emph> in which the drone crashed into a wall and was destroyed was preceded by a few seconds of lift, during which time students believed that they could make the drone fly and <emph>wanted to see it happen</emph>. Each of these positive, practical experiences helped them to build their interest in the goal of the project in a way that was entirely separate from extrinsic rewards or penalties, corresponding with a major component of OIT.</p> <p>For students, failure can be a dreaded experience. In a worst case scenario, students may interpret short‐term failures as long‐term indicators of success (Bandura, [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref43">4</reflink>]) and learn less from feedback because of the impact on their ego (Eskreis‐Winkler & Fishbach, [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref44">13</reflink>]). But "failure" is a necessary part of learning and all engineering practice, shaping the iterative stages of designs as engineers—and engineers in training—explore new pathways to reach the outcomes they desire (Simpson et al., [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref45">37</reflink>]). When it came to valuing documentation as a practice to support their now solidified goal, <emph>failure</emph> (again, used here expansively to encompass all problems in connection with the project) was as much of an instructor as success, a reflection of extensive literature on the role of failure in learning and engineering (Jackson et al., [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref46">19</reflink>]). Just like with intrinsic motivation to accomplish the goal, victories motivated continued use of documentation practices (e.g., successful use of diagrams to be able to rebuild and adjust the drone design). But while students may have continued to find the drone project fun even if no failures or significant difficulties arose, it was specifically failures of the drone design (e.g., the crash) and documentation (i.e., not recording the original settings and configuration of the drone before the crash) that helped students to internalize the need to create documentation. If they successfully made progress on the drone without documentation, they would not see a need for it. Likewise, identifying gaps in their documentation taught them to improve their practice until they were reminding each other to use specific routines and practices. By the end of the study, they were unconcerned with external pressures to document, having all but forgotten it was a part of their grade.</p> <p>In this case, we also saw limited engagement in documentation practices from some of the students who did not view it as their role (as it was not assigned to them) until later in the project. The team began enforcing for each other the importance of clearly communicating and writing down the results from testing, until it became standard practice for all students in the study. Nick, for example, largely was uninvolved in the creation of documentation but later became invested in carefully diagramming the drone configuration on the board in order to test new settings and conceptually draw out his future design plans. Eliot surprised everyone by producing documentation that was not only detailed but captured how the team was feeling, an interesting phenomenon that could be more intentionally studied in future research to track changes in students' affect and motivation.</p> <p>This case study demonstrates how failure followed by successes when using documentation helped students to see the problems that documentation could solve, without which they may not have learned to value self‐regulation of documentation. Motivation for self‐regulation within OIT, by definition, requires students to value a practice toward accomplishing a goal (Ryan & Deci, [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref47">32</reflink>]). Perhaps the clearest example is present in the transition from the external regulation stage to the identified stage, where students describe <emph>needing some way to see what they had already done</emph> after weekends or gaps between project days, but did not think of documentation as a solution, despite pre‐test survey responses describing documentation as a way to do exactly that. They relied on their memory instead. When it came to the drone crash, however, it became obvious to the group that no one could remember the exact location and position of each part in the previous configuration. They looked for photos, since they needed to know exactly how it was configured in order to <emph>not</emph> configure it that way again. This problem required more precision than group memory could account for, thus sparking their awareness of the significance of precise and useful documentation.</p> <p>While failure and moments that sparked interest in the goal shifted students' values toward documentation practices, it is worth noting that instruction and prompts from the instructor and first author were instrumental in helping students to identify both (a) information that was important to record, such as dial position relative to the drone, and (b) useful strategies for recording those unique types of documentation. Students ultimately identified their own strategies for communicating and documenting in the ways they liked best, but benefited from direction to see opportunities and strategies for documentation. Strategies for drawing student attention to documentable information are an important future direction for research, since there are many kinds of information students may not notice in different engineering design contexts. A civil engineering project, for example, may require significantly different documentation methods as compared to this mechanical engineering design task.</p> <hd id="AN0186992457-21">Complex engineering projects and self‐regulation</hd> <p>Long‐term, hands‐on, collaborative design projects offer important potential for developing self‐regulation for documentation. Ryan & Deci, ([<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref48">32</reflink>]) OIT assumes that self‐regulation is ultimately only a means of achieving a particular goal, not the behavior itself. Thus, it is important to build interest in the associated learning goal to help students value the self‐regulated practice. This project was designed for out‐of‐school learning with a primary goal of sparking interest in engineering through fun, engaging activities; just a few weeks in, students became invested in the project's intended goal. Without this opportunity to develop interest, students would not likely have been motivated enough to achieve the goal to identify the value of documenting and then integrate it fully into their practice (Wigfield & Cambria, [<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref49">41</reflink>]).</p> <p>In this project, students also received few grades, giving them many opportunities to make mistakes without impacting their grade, a pedagogical approach education research supports (Marks & Chase, [<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref50">23</reflink>]; Simpson et al., [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref51">37</reflink>]). Evidence of integrated self‐regulation of documentation practices suggests that the students will continue to use documentation practices, given the opportunity to work on similarly motivating projects. Furthermore, students' experiences prepared them with skills they could use in undergraduate engineering programs.</p> <p>Aspects of the project described in this research share commonality with college engineering co‐curricular activities, suggesting potential transferability of findings to such contexts (Memarian & Olewnik, [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref52">24</reflink>]). Although the project was introduced to a high school physics class, it was designed for out‐of‐school spaces and included competition and judges beyond the classroom. Significant aspects for determining whether the findings may transfer to other contexts include (a) hands‐on design activities, (b) limited structure and grading to regulate documentation behaviors, and (c) long‐term, complex design challenges where memory and communication are significant factors in success. This type of activity deviated substantially from this particular physics teacher's typical assignments. We note also that these findings could apply to other types of multi‐week complex design challenges with limited grading (i.e., reducing the significance of external motivators for documentation and communication practices), regardless of the engineering discipline (e.g., software engineering instead of electro‐mechanical) or whether the activity was designed for schools rather than out‐of‐school learning. But how students build communication and documentation practices may evolve differently based on the activity's tools and domain. Research should explore whether findings transfer from many forms of engineering education to engineering practice in college. In addition, researchers may examine whether transferability and development of motivation to self‐regulate are similar for both students participating in projects before college, in or out of school, and college‐level engineering students participating in co‐curricular engineering activities, and what that looks like in different subfields of engineering.</p> <hd id="AN0186992457-22">Limitations and future research directions</hd> <p>This study focused on students' motivation to self‐regulate communication practices that are a critical part of collaborative engineering practice and identified important connections between the motivating nature of the activity (successes and interest‐sparking events to promote motivation toward the goal) and the self‐regulated behaviors (documentation practices). Future research should explore whether these important developed behaviors continue longitudinally and carry over across learning settings (i.e., Do the self‐regulated behaviors persist when students engage with engineering practices moving forward?). Although the students in this study learned to see value in documentation practices for completing a project they were interested in, undergraduate coursework may not engender interest in the same way, resulting in a shift back from intrinsic to extrinsic motivation for the goal. Students who see the purpose of documentation to complete a goal they are interested in may not choose to engage in it when they lose interest in the goal. Future research should also explore other implications of bringing extra‐curricular learning practices into formal engineering classrooms. In this study, we did not explore the impacts of students' self‐regulation on the <emph>effectiveness</emph> of their collaboration practices.</p> <p>It is a limitation of this study that the students were at a high‐resourced, affluent school, in an advanced placement (high achieving) course. Although the team of students was diverse in race and gender, their well‐resourced circumstances may not allow all findings to easily transfer to other schools. Students in this case ultimately responded positively to thinking their kit was stolen (developing a documentation routine to combat future loss of parts); despite a requirement to raise funding, their project was fully funded by the school to prevent any team from being unable to compete, with plenty of spare tools and materials available through their teacher's classroom. In a low‐resourced school where students truly had to raise the money themselves, threat of such a loss might have been considerably more stressful, damaged relationships due to frustration or anger, and the situation may have become too discouraging to inspire positive solutions. Likewise, when the drone smashed apart, it was not cost‐prohibitive for the team to obtain replacement parts. Funding is a significant factor in hands‐on learning that should be considered fully to determine how best to translate findings from this study to other settings (Bonnette & Crowley, [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref53">5</reflink>]). This is particularly significant because the experiences of many students of color in the United States are unlikely to reflect the students in this study, due to the proportion of low‐resourced schools serving Black and Latinx communities (Owens, [<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref54">26</reflink>]).</p> <p>It is an additional limitation of the study that it took place before a recording camera in small spaces. This was potentially obtrusive and proved less welcome with other teams in the physics class than the Sky team. The Sky team was chosen in large part because they were able to quickly adapt to and welcome both the camera and researcher into their space. Although this made it easier to capture nuanced details about student interactions, the camera was sitting on a tripod, taking up physical space, and may have impacted student behavior (e.g., what they felt comfortable saying in front of a camera and researcher). The Sky team was also a predominantly female team with a higher proportion of students of color than most teams; it is possible that they were more comfortable talking to the first author (Latinx, female‐presenting) than teams comprised primarily of White males. It is not uncommon for students to respond more openly with researchers who they feel better represent them (Ridgeway & Yerrick, [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref55">28</reflink>]).</p> <hd id="AN0186992457-23">Actionable lessons for teaching</hd> <p>In line with the research findings, engineering educators should anticipate some obstacles in cultivating self‐regulation for documentation among students. We make the following recommendations based on the factors that shaped students' transition from external to integrated self‐regulation.</p> <p> <emph>Build interest in a learning goal first</emph>. Students learn to self‐regulate primarily when they are motivated to accomplish the goal self‐regulation supports. Prior literature suggests that out‐of‐school activities can be highly motivating, sparking and sustaining interest, since youth self‐select into these projects but still maintain motivation to engage (Bonnette et al., [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref56">6</reflink>]). Inclusive learning frameworks, for example, Universal Design for Learning, often recommend methods for recruiting interest in a goal, such as giving students autonomy of choice (Rose, [<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref57">31</reflink>]). Here the physics teacher successfully incorporated a motivating out‐of‐school activity into his classroom to spark interest and excitement, one that had been iterated upon for years with many students self‐selecting into the design challenge in both in and out‐of‐school settings across the United States. Thus, other instructors might find success with motivating students to learn documentation practices if they incorporate activities into their classrooms from out‐of‐school engineering programs that have been found to be challenging and motivating in a similar way (fun, long‐term, hands‐on, complex, and collaborative).</p> <p> <emph>Allow students to fail and succeed early and often</emph>. This is a message repeated in much engineering literature on the subject and applies in the context of self‐regulating documentation as well (Marks & Chase, [<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref58">23</reflink>]). Students can be given hands‐on, practical opportunities to see how documentation is valuable for achieving their interests in low‐stakes situations. Small fun lab activities that require effective documentation practices to succeed may help students to learn the importance of self‐regulating. It is critical that students have chances to learn this before investing time on semester‐long projects with potentially damaging consequences, such as failing a class or wasting expensive project materials. Simply telling students that documentation is important, even when explaining why, is unlikely to internalize motivation to self‐regulate documentation practices. This reflects a common problem in learning described in models such as Bloom's Taxonomy, in which students have memorized information but not yet reached a deeper understanding such that they are able to apply the knowledge (Armstrong, [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref59">2</reflink>]). Instructors can help prompt students to see documentation self‐regulation as a solution to the problems they encounter and celebrate the successes its use fosters.</p> <p> <emph>Scaffold the learning process</emph>. It is important that students are not discouraged when failure inevitably happens. Scaffolding documentation practices in these moments can help prevent tension caused when students value documentation practices but cannot yet create effective documentation for communicating ideas over time. Instructors can do this by sharing examples of effective documentation, explaining what makes it effective, and reminding students of opportunities to document. Formative assessments throughout, even ungraded, could also support students' process of creating effective documentation throughout a project, as they provide opportunities for identifying misconceptions, miscommunications, and other points of frustration that can hinder student progress (Ritchhart & Church, [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref60">30</reflink>]; Saavedra & Opfer, [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref61">34</reflink>]).</p> <hd id="AN0186992457-24">CONCLUSION</hd> <p>Documentation practices are a critical part of engineering education. However, successful integration into students' practices beyond the classroom is influenced by motivation. Students motivated to achieve complex goals, such as building a drone, can develop motivation to self‐regulate documentation practices. Failures and successes are an important part of this learning process. Complex low‐stakes projects can give students opportunities for both interest development and safe spaces for failure and practical skill development. Applying this concept, educators and researchers can better support students learning of documentation skills.</p> <hd id="AN0186992457-25">ACKNOWLEDGMENTS</hd> <p>This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. 1735945. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.</p> <ref id="AN0186992457-26"> <title> REFERENCES </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref1" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> ABET. (2022). Criteria for accrediting engineering programs, 2022–2023. ABET. https://<ulink href="http://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/criteria-for-accrediting-engineering-programs-2022-2023/">www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/criteria-for-accrediting-engineering-programs-2022-2023/</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref59" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> Armstrong, P. (2010). Bloom's taxonomy. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib3" idref="ref15" type="bt">3</bibl> <bibtext> Aurigemma, J., Chandrasekharan, S., Nersessian, N. J., & Newstetter, W. (2013). 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  Data: Getting the Picture: Developing Intrinsic Motivation to Self-Regulate Engineering Documentation Practices in a High School Drone Design Challenge
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  Data: English
– Name: Author
  Label: Authors
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  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Rachel+N%2E+Bonnette%22">Rachel N. Bonnette</searchLink> (ORCID <externalLink term="https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5498-244X">0000-0001-5498-244X</externalLink>)<br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Monica+L%2E+Miles%22">Monica L. Miles</searchLink> (ORCID <externalLink term="https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0006-1842">0000-0003-0006-1842</externalLink>)
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  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Journal+of+Engineering+Education%22"><i>Journal of Engineering Education</i></searchLink>. 2025 114(3).
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  Data: Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us
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  Data: Y
– Name: Pages
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  Data: 19
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  Label: Publication Date
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  Data: 2025
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  Data: National Science Foundation (NSF)
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  Data: 1735945
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  Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Research
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  Group: Audnce
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22High+Schools%22">High Schools</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Secondary+Education%22">Secondary Education</searchLink>
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  Label: Descriptors
  Group: Su
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22High+School+Students%22">High School Students</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Student+Motivation%22">Student Motivation</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Engineering%22">Engineering</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Documentation%22">Documentation</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Aviation+Technology%22">Aviation Technology</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Design%22">Design</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Cooperative+Learning%22">Cooperative Learning</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Teamwork%22">Teamwork</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Success%22">Success</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Failure%22">Failure</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Student+Projects%22">Student Projects</searchLink>
– Name: DOI
  Label: DOI
  Group: ID
  Data: 10.1002/jee.70019
– Name: ISSN
  Label: ISSN
  Group: ISSN
  Data: 1069-4730<br />2168-9830
– Name: Abstract
  Label: Abstract
  Group: Ab
  Data: Background: Engineers must learn to document their process to communicate effectively in teams--a skill that calls for knowing "how" and "when" to capture information, as well as the self-regulation to continually engage in this practice. Motivation to self-regulate requires that students be motivated to complete a goal and see value in the practice toward accomplishing that goal, raising the question of how students' experiences while participating in an engineering design task impact their motivation to self-regulate their documentation practices. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the sequence of events that lead to changes in students' "motivation to self-regulate" documentation practices to support their design process. Method: We use Organismic Integration Theory on the phases of intrinsic motivation to self-regulate as a lens in a case study to capture the collective growth of a high school engineering design team collaborating over the course of a semester-long drone design challenge. Results: Findings demonstrate that both "successes and failures" played an intimate role in increasing intrinsic motivation to engage in self-regulatory practices, as increased motivation to see their drone fly pushed students to question the role of documentation in the design process. Conclusion: When high school students work on intrinsically motivating projects with opportunities for both successes and failures, they can learn to self-regulate documentation practices. We discuss the implications for instruction and research in turn.
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  Data: 2025
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  Label: Accession Number
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  Data: EJ1478486
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    Identifiers:
      – Type: doi
        Value: 10.1002/jee.70019
    Languages:
      – Text: English
    PhysicalDescription:
      Pagination:
        PageCount: 19
    Subjects:
      – SubjectFull: High School Students
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Student Motivation
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Engineering
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Documentation
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Aviation Technology
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Design
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Cooperative Learning
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Teamwork
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Success
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Failure
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Student Projects
        Type: general
    Titles:
      – TitleFull: Getting the Picture: Developing Intrinsic Motivation to Self-Regulate Engineering Documentation Practices in a High School Drone Design Challenge
        Type: main
  BibRelationships:
    HasContributorRelationships:
      – PersonEntity:
          Name:
            NameFull: Rachel N. Bonnette
      – PersonEntity:
          Name:
            NameFull: Monica L. Miles
    IsPartOfRelationships:
      – BibEntity:
          Dates:
            – D: 01
              M: 07
              Type: published
              Y: 2025
          Identifiers:
            – Type: issn-print
              Value: 1069-4730
            – Type: issn-electronic
              Value: 2168-9830
          Numbering:
            – Type: volume
              Value: 114
            – Type: issue
              Value: 3
          Titles:
            – TitleFull: Journal of Engineering Education
              Type: main
ResultId 1