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Marshall, S. (2000). Planning in Context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of California, Los Angeles, CA.
While a growing body of work in project-based design activities has looked at students' developing science understanding, less attention has been paid to long-term design projects as a rich context for exploring students' developing practices of planning and project management. Taking a sociocultural approach, this study looked at how student teams negotiated a shared framework of the practices necessary to manage their software design task. Using data from three successive team planning meetings, the study sought to: a) characterize and look for similarities and differences in the components of teams' planning frameworks over time and b) examine factors that supported the negotiation of a planning framework. Results indicate that team's planning frameworks included a common set of project management components, but that different components were emphasized by different teams at different points in time, in response to changing project demands. Two factors played a role in supporting the construction of shared team frameworks for planning: the conversational strategies and experience brought to bear by oldtimer members of the team, and the use of planning tools to represent team plans. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for classroom practice and identifiable characteristics of more and less successful planning collaborations.