Monica E. Cardella,1 Şenay Purzer,1 and Johannes Strobel2
1Purdue University, 2Texas A&M University
INTRODUCTION
There is an exciting path ahead of us as national interest in pre-college engineering education continues to grow throughout the world and in the U.S. in particular. The interest in pre-college engineering education stems from four different motivations: (1) from a workforce pipeline or pathway perspective, where researchers and practitioners are interested in understanding influential and motivational factors that promote students’ interest in engineering and progression of engineering thinking such that people pursue engineering degrees and engineering careers; (2) from a general societal perspective, where technological literacy and understanding of the role of engineering and technologies in society is increasingly important for the general populace and it is increasingly imperative to foster this understanding of technologies and engineering from a younger age so all students have access to engineering learning; (3) from a STEM integration and education perspective, where engineering and the engineering design process are used as contexts to teach science and mathematics concepts; and (4) from a skill development perspective, where engineering education is a way to promote 21st-century skills. While the chapters in this book addressed each of these motivations and diverse means to address them, there is still tremendous opportunity ahead of us to continue this work and to effect pre-college educational experiences.
WHERE WE ARE: WHAT WE KNOW
As this book was compiled, the Next Generation Science Standards, which include explicit engineering standards for each grade level, were finalized through an iterative and collaborative process involving 26 states (NGSS Lead States, 2013). At the time this chapter was written, 8 states had adopted the standards: California, Delaware, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington (Illinois State Board of Education, 2013). Later, the list included Illinois, Nevada, and Oregon and continues to expand. At the same time, many states have already had state-specific engineering standards in place. As engineering standards are adopted and implemented, resources and research is needed to ensure that there are high-quality curricula available to address the standards at each grade level; ensure that teachers are prepared to provide educational experiences that meet the standards and convey accurate understandings of engineering; provide parents with resources to support their children’s learning; partner with informal educators to further strengthen students’ learning experiences as well as support adults’ engineering learning; and develop assessments that provide accurate measures of engineering knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. We summarize the ways in which these needs are addressed by the chapters in this volume.
Current state of engineering education in formal settings
Current research on engineering education in formal education settings can be categorized under two main areas: those that focus on studying STEM integration approaches (i.e., design-based science) and those focus on an emphasized “E” approach. There are also hybrid approaches including aspects of both. A common aspect of these approaches is their use of design projects or challenges as a context to motivate students.
Although these approaches agree in their argument that many things around children are human made and that it is important for children to understand he designed world, they differ in their main goals. In a STEM integration approach, the main goal is supporting student learning in traditional content areas, such as science or mathematics. For example, design-based science aims to improve students’ science content knowledge by using engineering design as a context to teach science (e.g., Puntambekar & Kolodner, 2005). This approach is sometimes seen as an alternative to inquiry-based science.
In an emphasized “E” approach, the main goal is teaching engineering knowledge and skills such as design. This approach also focuses on changing negative views of engineers and engineering, which is shown to be a barrier to attracting a diverse workforce into the engineering profession (NAE, 2008).
The chapters on formal education represent views from these two approaches. These chapters illustrate that students at the elementary, middle, and high schools are able to engage in engineering. However, these chapters also argue that certain barriers had to be managed for effective STEM integration to occur through engineering education to support student learning in content areas such as mathematics and science. Students do not learn science or mathematics at a deep conceptual level simply by engaging in engineering design unless these activities are supported by
• experimentation with physical materials,
• deep reasoning and reflection activities,
• conceptual change strategies, and/or
• scaffolding for learning transfer.
Current state of engineering education in informal settings
Complementing the chapters on engineering learning in formal environments (i.e., the classroom) are chapters on engineering learning in out-of-school settings. Interestingly, the majority of educational research tends to focus on issues of learning related to classroom settings, which is in contrast to the fact that the majority of the learner’s time is spent outside of the classroom. Thus there is a wealth of opportunities for considering how children and adolescents learn engineering, what they learn about engineering in such out-of-school settings, what motivates them to learn engineering concepts and content, and how we might measure engineering learning within the context of informal learning environments. Informal learning environments are typically divided into three main categories: everyday settings (or everyday life), designed settings, and extracurricular programs that support learning (NRC, 2009).
Within this volume, we have learned that children can and do learn engineering concepts from very young ages as they engage in play and reading activities with their parents, guardians and other family members; that young people become excited about and interested in concepts of engineering that align with their lived experiences and their interests for benefiting society through television shows such as Design Squad and websites such as Engineer Your Life; that science museums (as well as technology centers) are settings that can facilitate both engineering learning and research on engineering learning; and that young people can learn about engineering through the motivation of design challenges, like those experienced in programs like FIRST Robotics.
Current state of engineering education assessment
Assessment is an integral aspect of both educational practice and educational research. Effective assessment instruments and practices provide opportunities for feedback for the learner, which guides future learning, and opportunities for researchers to investigate the effectiveness of various interventions as well as learning that might be occurring naturally or in an uncontrolled environment. Assessment is currently considered a major need and a major opportunity in P–12 engineering education research, and the chapters in this volume represent considerable progress in some key areas: the assessment of the design process as a process (rather than the learner’s understanding of individual steps or the final product or outcome of the process), assessment of creativity, and work toward establishing the larger landscape of assessment in pre-college engineering education research. In addition, the chapter led by Prevost on the EEBEI-T reminds the reader of key concepts for developing assessment instruments for pre-college engineering education research, in terms of issues of validity and reliability, and using multiple approaches in assessment.
WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW
While much work has been done to provide a solid foundation for future research, as well as to provide a foundational set of resources as engineering standards continue to be adopted, there are still many opportunities for further research and development work.
Future work for engineering education in formal settings
Although design and engineering had a place in the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996), the importance of engineering education has become more prevalent today with the development of A Framework For K-12 Science Education (NRC, 2012) and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013).
Further research on STEM integration is needed to address such questions as
• How equitable is design-based learning?
• How do children transfer learning in an integrated STEM approach?
• What are the differences among various types of integration approaches?
In addition, the coverage of studies focusing on “E” needs to be expanded and answer such questions as
• How do students learn engineering specialty skills, such as the abilities to make trade-offs?
• What is the progression of design thinking?
• What is the role of engineering education in supporting critical thinking and creativity?
Future work for engineering education in informal settings
In general, engineering learning in informal environments has received very little research attention (both in pre-college contexts and college/post-college contexts). Thus there is much to learn about how people learn about engineering and how people learn specific engineering concepts and content in informal environments. To begin, we know that many college students have a parent who is an engineer, but we know little about why or how that parent makes an impact on the child’s engineering interest. Do parents with engineering backgrounds engage in qualitatively different activities with their children than parents without engineering backgrounds? Are there things we can learn from engineer parents that can be taught to non-engineer parents, or activities that engineer parents engage in that can be transferred to classroom contexts? How do children learn about engineering through media, including websites, television shows, and storybooks? Does engagement in an engineering exhibit at a science museum spark interest in engaging in other informal engineering learning experiences, such as a summer camp with a STEM focus?
Much of this research is beginning to happen, through projects like the Science Museum of Minnesota’s “Gender Research on Adult-Child Discussion in Informal Engineering eNvironmenTs” project and WGBH’s “Informal Pathways to Engineering” project. However, much more work is yet to be done to understand opportunities to connect learning experiences across informal learning environments; how families can help facilitate engineering learning; and how the learning experiences in informal settings can help us consider how to shape the learning experiences that happen in classroom settings.
Issue of privileged access are also paramount as we consider engineering learning in informal environments: not all children have access to engineer parents (or other engineer relatives). Science museums can be an invaluable learning experience—but a child’s access to the science museum experience can be limited based on proximity (how close is the nearest science museum?) and income, among other factors (e.g., language, time, physical ability, knowledge of the existence of science museums). Finally, assessment is a particular challenge for informal learning environments, as many of the assessment methods that are commonly used in formal learning environments disrupt the nature of the informal learning environment.
Future work for engineering education assessment
As more studies are being conducted to further our understanding of how to best enable pre-college students to learn engineering skills and concepts, and more work is done to determine best practices to prepare teachers to teach engineering content and concepts, efforts need to focus on the development of assessment instruments. As new instruments are developed to assess topics that are new(er) to the K–12 curriculum, we must ensure that we are actually measuring what we think we are measuring. This can be challenging, as some core topics, such as optimization (Katehi, Pearson, & Feder, 2009), are still understudied—so first we must better understand what it means for children and youth to engage in optimization, and the different types of optimization processes used by children and youth, before we can be sure that we are appropriately measuring optimization.
Similarly, we need to consider potential biases in our instruments, and their intended audience. We must consider the people who will use the results obtained from these assessment instruments and the types of decisions they will make. Likewise, we can consider not only assessment instruments but also assessment infrastructures that can support and promote collaboration across different teams of researchers. The use of a common instrument by multiple researchers in different contexts can enable comparative studies and facilitate the overall growth of our understanding of pre-college engineering education.
Finally, we must consider the unique context of informal learning environments, and the advantages and challenges that come with informal learning environments. While administering formal tests does not match the ecological context of informal learning environments, we can collect information through the use of weblogs or smart phones. In addition, informal learning environments lend themselves to focusing on constructs such as motivation and interest that are less profound in studies associated with learning in formal classroom settings.
WHERE ARE WE HEADED?
This volume presents a diverse array of studies in engineering education that address policy, research on teacher education, research on student learning, research on curriculum development, and research on assessment. Each chapter highlights aspects of the current state of research and gives a direction to future research. Research in each of these areas will continue to develop as we further work to inform policy, understand teacher learning, identify engineering pedagogical content knowledge, understand student learning, identify learning progressions, and develop approaches to measuring engineering knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. While we anticipate future strides in each of these areas individually, and in the ways that each of these areas can be further focused (e.g., rural second graders’ understanding of engineering and technology in their lived experiences), there is also a great need for research on a larger scale and comparative studies.
Engineering learning occurs across the lifespan and across life experiences. Future research might include longitudinal studies that look at engineering learning from preschool to elementary to middle to high school, then college and beyond; studies that examine how students’ experiences with engineering in formal settings relate to their experiences with engineering in informal settings; engineering learning and the development of 21st-century skills as well as ways to assess such complex learning in and beyond the classroom.
In addition, we as a community have a tremendous opportunity to consider the full impact of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013)—large-scale studies can examine how national educational systems as well as the national workforce change over time with this shift toward engineering education experiences for everyone.
With the tremendous opportunities ahead, there are opportunities for researchers to continue on the already established research trajectories, and opportunities for new paradigms of research that involve teachers, guidance counsellors, administrators, and parents in action research; opportunities for school systems and informal organizations to re-think their roles and how they collaborate to provide coordinated learning experiences as part of an engineering learning eco-system; and opportunities to capitalize on the affordances of technology to engage learners in new ways.
REFERENCES
Illinois State Board of Education (2013). States lead the effort to write new science standards. Retrieved from http://www.isbe.state.il.us/%5C/ngss/default.htm
Katehi, L., Pearson, G., & Feder, M. (Eds.). (2009). Engineering in K-12 education: Understanding the status and improving the prospects. Committee on K-12 Engineering Education. National Academy of Engineering, National Research Council. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
National Research Council (NRC). (1996). National science education standards. National Committee on Science Education Standards and Assessment, Board on Science Education, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
National Research Council (NRC). (2008). Changing the conversation: Messages for improving public understanding of engineering. Committee on Public Understanding of Engineering Messages. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
National Research Council (NRC). (2009). Learning science in informal environments: People, places, and pursuits. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
NGSS Lead States. (2013). Next Generation Science Standards: For states, by states. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
Puntambekar, S., & Kolodner, J. L. (2005). Toward implementing distributed scaffolding: Helping students learn science from design. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 42(2), 185–217. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/tea.20048