The change of perspective that Welty suggests will require more careful study of how activities help students to learn ideas and skills identified for literacy. During Benenson's shopping bag activity he suggested a list of ideas and skills that the activity could address such as data collection, prediction, fair test, different kinds of forces, properties of materials and structures, and design and failure. The idea of having an activity to talk about research was part of an overall plan of providing a context where participants could discuss the relationship between the ideas and skills students should learn and the kind of research that can help us to understand how they might achieve literacy. For example, one may say that in the bag activity students are learning about failure. If this is the case, the question is how children learn ideas about failure.
Good research is useful to explain how students understand specific technological ideas and skills.
This research will help to identify where students have problems and what kind of instructional approaches can help teachers and students to overcome these difficulties. The context of the bag activity provided an opportunity to think about the kind of research that can improve our understanding of teaching and learning about the nature of design and failure. Here research can make an important contribution in unpacking the ideas about failure students have. I have used the example of design in part because design was presented by several participants and because there is some research about design and problem solving. But design is only a small part of technology.