college application process, ACT/SAT tests, etc., can offer greatpeer-to-peer insight to younger, less-experienced students. For a sample of those insights, see,“My View From the Trenches: Reflections About Peer Mentoring in the Information Age,”attached here.Research ObjectivesIn evaluating the adaptation of the social stress model to STEM career choices with respect to theeffect of peer influence on Appalachia area high school students, we asked these questions: 1. What effect does peer influence have on learning math tips, SAT/ACT preparation, or challenging academic material when presented to high school students by peers during our EOT summer camp? 2. What effect does peer influence play when a high school
the participants blew on them. Unlike the Waves ofDestruction; the Hovercraft; and the Concrete: Mix, Pour, and Decorate activities, however,these two activities required much less physical engagement on the part of the participants. Thisreduction in physical movement is reflected in these activities’ lower mean participant ratingswith regard to fun. It is also important to note here that the Airplane Design activity, whichappeared at the bottom of the list of the top 14 highest ranking activities on the fun meter, gavethe participants even fewer chances for doing something with their bodies. Although theparticipants enjoyed using a computer design program to create an airplane, this activity failed toengage them physically: Indeed, they did
questions addressing DET.Next, a group of education and engineering faculty reviewed the survey items and identified theitems that best reflected the information being sought. A hard copy of the second draft of thesurvey was then created and field tested with a focus group of five teachers who helped refinethe wording and added or eliminated items. These teachers were given an honorarium for theirparticipation. A final electronic version of the survey was placed on a website that allowedteachers to respond to the survey via internet. The final version of the survey included 69 items,each with a four-point response format ranging from one to four. Sixty-five of the survey itemswere to be answered by teachers at all grade levels. The last four items
experts, these practices translate to a highly iterative, reflective processinvolving complex problem framing, thorough research, analysis of tradeoffs, and controlledtesting.13, 14 It is widely acknowledged that student engineering does not generally look like thatof professionals, in that students may appear to skip doing research, conduct unsystematic testsor favor immediate building rather than planning in advance.13,14 Recent work, however,suggests that students can engage in age-appropriate engineering practices.10,12,15,16 For example,students have been found to discuss the complexities of a problem scope, effectively plan usingdesign drawings, and engage in legitimate testing setups.12,15,16This paper is motivated by the conjecture that
motivation and selfdirection so they become lifelong explorers. Because participants' prior knowledge of the problem at hand is often limited, engineers first introduce the core concepts in a 15 minute presentation. After this instruction, families have the freedom to evaluate and shape their learning, pursuing those questions and concepts that are of greatest interest. Additionally, by moving through the stages of inspiration, planning, building, reflecting, and redesigning (i.e. engineering design process (EDP)) with their children, parents and caregivers model important skills including persistence, creativity, and curiosity to find new solutions. Evaluation
- 3:30 Dismissal Dismissal Dismissal Dismissal Figure 1: Sample Camp Agendas Page 26.644.6Strategic Camp Design ProcessOver the course of many years designing, offering, assessing, re-designing, re-assessing, etc. oursummer camps we have developed a strategic design process approach for existing and newcamps. The simple steps are: Make it Easy, Make it Fun, Make it Work, Work the Mechanics,and Assessment and Reflection. Each of these is described in more detail below:Making it EasyAfter the camp leadership team has
) Page 26.1500.5would set an output voltage of 5V at the digital pin 9, while the same command with LOW instead of HIGH Will setthat digital pin to 0V.2 [] Indicate actions or gesturesOne could argue that instead of tinkering, Hazel and Silver should have systematically parsed thecode to make sense of it right from the start; they would have had better task success and betterlearned Arduino programming through that process. We contend this notion. Hazel’s and Silver’sactivities reflect a recognition of the variety of resources at their disposal and a systematic walkthrough the resources to try and achieve their goal. At each stage, they expanded the scope oftheir investigation: first, getting feedback from manipulating the specific system
rewarding. In fact, volunteers reported they had workedwith the same school for three to four years, on average, suggesting that strong and sustainablerelationships are formed through the AWIM program.Volunteers perceived positive student reactions to their involvement in the AWIM activities,from their interest in the activities to their interest in learning more about STEM topics in thefuture. Table 4 shows mean ratings of the extent to which volunteers believed several statements(i.e., AWIM’s intended outcomes) accurately reflected students’ reactions to their participationwith the AWIM Challenges. Ratings were made on a scale from 1 (Not at all) to 5 (Quite a bit).Table 4Volunteers’ Perceptions of Students’ Reactions to their Participation
surveyresponses of the participating science teachers.12 Participating schools and teachers committedto full participation in the three-year program. 13, 14Follow-up activities during the academic year, including observations by UA mentors andparticipating science teachers, were designed to provide additional time for inquiry, reflection,and mentoring and to sustain the long-term practice of including hands-on laboratory activitiesaligned with the Science Frameworks.Year One Workshop ActivitiesThe year one Summer Institute was focused on providing engineering hands-on activitiesteachers could subsequently conduct in their classrooms. For each activity, the Instituteprovided: 1) a presentation and discussion of the topic background; 2) time to perform
encounter problems or ask questions leadinginto the explanation phase, in which students describe what they think is happening and areready to learn from their peers and teacher. In the elaboration phase students apply what theyhave learned to meet the larger design challenge. Finally, in evaluation students reflect on whatthey learned.Contextual Learning and Problem Solving. Students often fail to connect what they learn inschool with the world around them. The engineering problems in EiE demonstrate how math,science, engineering, and creativity are needed to solve a problem. Situating learning in a largercontext piques students’ interest and helps them to understand how what they are learninginteracts with the real world or solves a problem 24
the null hypotheses. Thismixed-methods approach was used to be able to: 1) determine whether certain measures thatcapture aspects of identity were significantly different across variables (e.g., views of self versussuspected views of others), including time (i.e., pre- versus post-teaching) and people (e.g.,classroom versus enrichment teachers); and 2) create more open-ended opportunities forparticipants to reflect on survey responses and to capture the range of perspectives about teacher-of-engineering identities across participants. The first of these goals is the work of quantitativetools like items on the survey used in this study; the second is the work of qualitative items onsurveys and within interviews. The author and a
Tufts Center of Engineering Education and Outreach. Hynes received his B.S. in mechanical engineering in 2001 and his Ph.D. in engineering education in 2009 (both degrees at Tufts University). In his current positions, Hynes serves as PI and Co-PI on a number of funded research projects investigating engineering education in the K-12 and college settings. He is particularly interested in how students and teachers engage in and reflect upon the engineering design process. His research includes investigating how teachers conceptualize and then teach engineering through in-depth case study analysis. Hynes also spends time working at the Sarah Greenwood K-8 school (a Boston Public School), assisting teachers in
final day of the course. Moststudents answered the survey immediately, but some answered it over the next couple of weeks.Seventeen of the 19 participants responded to the final survey. The post survey asked severalquestions about their overall experience and also asked the students to share their reflections oneach session. They were encouraged to use their notes to help recall their reactions to theindividual sessions.We found that at the end of the week, students had a broader perception of computing and wereable to name fields within the discipline besides programming. Table 4 lists the top 4 answersgiven by students. In addition, students listed a much richer set of career possibilities includingtechnical consultant, project management
other product Test and Evaluate (POD-TE) Generating testable hypotheses and designing experiments to gather data that should be used to evaluate the prototype or solution, and to use this feedback in redesignApply Science, Engineering, and The practice of engineering requires the application of science,Mathematics Knowledge (SEM) mathematics, and engineering knowledge and engineering education at the K-12 level should emphasize this interdisciplinary natureEngineering Thinking (EThink) Students should be independent and reflective thinkers capable of
use of simple haptic or hands-on activities in precollege STEM coursesshould be encouraged to take advantage of students’ natural abilities and to help improve theirspatial skills which could enhance their chances of success in future academic and careerpursuits.Haptics and Visualization in STEM EducationWhile there are certain benefits to using virtual instruction in engineering and technology, Page 24.662.2including potentially lower cost and little/no equipment maintenance, 3D interaction usingsoftware is often simplified and does not always accurately reflect actual function which in turndoes not yield optimal results. These results are
forteaching science. Participants rate their beliefs on a five point Likert scale ranging from “1”representing “Strongly Disagree” to “5” representing “Strongly Agree” as they respond to itemssuch as, “I am continually finding better ways to teach science” or reversed phrased items suchas, “I am not very effective in monitoring science experiments.” We made modifications tosome of the STEBI items to reflect a more general focus on STEM, rewriting items such as,“Increased teacher effort in teaching science produces little change in some student's scienceachievement” to read “Increased teacher effort in teaching STEM content produces little changein some student's STEM learning achievement.” The modified version of the instrument waspreviously used to
never really achieved inpublic education, was to teach students in the early elementary through high school grades aboutthe industrial culture that dominated the American landscape in the 20th century. In contrast tothe commonly held belief that IA was only about vocational tool skills, the ideology on which IAwas established in the l870s was a general education ideology in support of the notion that allboys and girls in the U.S. would benefit from the study of our industrial culture. Much the sameideology that now leads many to believe “K-12 engineering education” today would benefit allstudents, not just those seeking the postsecondary vocational engineering track.The presentation of a paper titled “A Curriculum to Reflect Technology”10 at
, seeks to enhancethe effectiveness of the instructional process through application of experiential educationtechniques.According to Kolb [2], experiential learning exists across four modes, including (i) concreteexperience, (ii) reflective observation, (iii) abstract conceptualization, and (iv) activeexperimentation (p. 30). The primary components of learning processes exist along twocontinuums relating concrete experience to abstract conceptualization and reflective observationto active experimentation. The COSMOS program incorporates activities with elements frombroad ranges of these spectra, e.g., some activities were heavily observation-based while othersinvolved active, trial-and-error problems; some relate concretely to lecture material
identifying basic, emergent, proficient and distinguished attributeswas developed and used. The Assessment Plan and Reflection criteria were also adapted fromNYSATL,16 the remaining criteria were deemed important for our internal STEM Partnershipgoals and the assessment of Learning Experiences developed through the Summer Institutes.Table 3: Self assessment checklist components for institute instructors to challenge participants to reach a higher level of rigor and relevance in STEM Institutes Effective Strategies: Institute participants are asked to… Brainstorm Classify data Work in cooperative pairs/teams Complete analogies Participate in simulation/role play
53 (engineers) and 54 (scientists) percent of the studentsexpressed uncertainty regarding the potential salaries of engineers and scientists. Approximately42 percent of the students believe engineers and scientist “make a lot of money.”Four questions on the survey addressed student attitudes towards engineering and science. Thefrequency distributions of responses to these questions are shown in Figure 2. The first two ofthese questions asked students to select the statement that best reflected their feelings or“affection” for the engineering or science disciplines. Approximately 63 percent of the studentindicated they either “love” or “like” engineering on the pre-survey. This percentage increased to72 percent on the post-study survey. When
‐waypairedstudent'st‐testwasusedtocomparepre‐andpost‐responsesforeachof 26 items for both the treatment and control groups. We also performed a two-wayunpaired student's t-test analysis comparing the change in the treatment group (with changedefined as post-score minus pre-score) to the change in the control group.Students also completed free response reflections at the conclusion of each STEM classroomvisit.Student Research FindingsThe analysis of the surveys shows no significant (p<0.05) differences between students’ prevs. post responses, or between the treatment and control groups, in these four areas: their understanding of the nature of engineering and science their knowledge about STEMs’ work their perception of STEMs
STEMnotebooks in their classrooms as each student’s record of his/her own learning. Very little wasavailable at the time about STEM note booking but as an engineer, Ms. Parry knew theprofessional practice of engineers keeping documentation of their work. This combined with thethen available research on science notebooks in elementary schools (Ruiz-Primo and Li)provided the basis for training. To model the process, Ms. Parry gave each participant their ownSTEM notebook and gave feedback each evening on the day’s prompts and reflections. Furtherinformation on STEM notebooks is provided later in this paper.Teamwork was another topic of the training. One of the most important aspects of working andthinking like engineers is working in teams. Initially
thinking skills can be improved by engagingstudents in hands-on engineering and design activities intended to foster knowledge, skillsdevelopment, and problem solving [1]. Engineering activities foster the development ofindependent, reflective, and metacognitive thinking in K-12 students [6]. In particular,engineering thinking involves creativity and innovation. Creativity involves fluency (producing alarge number of ideas), flexibility (producing a variety of ideas that fit in different categories oran ability to see things from different perspectives), and novelty (producing ideas that are uniqueand original) [16, 17]. According to Shah and Vargas-Hernandez [18], “an engineering designmust not only be novel (unusual, unexpected) but it must also
FOUR: 12 – 15 August, 2013 Teachers worked collaboratively and with curricula development coaches to finalize lessons. Consolidation Emphasis was placed on reviewing the vertical integration of learning goals among disciplines and grade levels. Participants also developed a range of assessment materials that reflect learning within the Common Core State Standards.Students Provide Beta Testing and Teachers Receive Two Levels of Feedback: Participating teachers spenta portion of their day crafting and field-testing small learning units for a group of 350 gifted-and-talented (G/T)students attending co-located summer enrichment programs that mirrored the learning activities being
relevance of computing. Nearlyall of the attendees expressed the desire to make the computer science courses more interesting andattractive to potential students, and particularly to girls and under-represented minorities. Basedon these expectations, we developed a workshop theme of “Computer Science is relevant, practical,and fun.” Computer science is relevant for high school students because of the pervasiveness of Page 23.1363.5computing in our world, with computers integrated into everything from cars to communicationdevices to entertainment. The practicality of teaching learning computer science is reflected in thebroad range of learning
describe an engineer.Description of the Engineering Design ProjectSince a project-based approach was used, it is necessary to first describe the project to provideneeded context to understand the format and structure of the six week summer intervention.Prior to the beginning of the summer course, two electrical engineering graduate studentsdesigned a custom radio control (RC) car. The design goals of the car were to have a systemsimple enough for high school students to build during the 11 contact hours per week for sixweeks. The design project reflects, to the extent possible, as many possible steps of theengineering design cycle 20. A critical criterion was developing an accessible design project thatallowed students to make choices and also to
with this extramural funding model the cost per school is substantial -- close to $100,000.In return for the technology and program infrastructure, EAST schools must comply with anumber of program requirements. Of these, most impressive from an equity standpoint, is therequirement that student participants reflect the demographics of their school’s student body by Page 13.1075.3age, gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and academic status. This stipulation ensuresthat all students at the school receive equal access to what EAST has to offer, and that EASTProject resources are allocated equitably to all students. It not only makes
; Transportation; and Manufacturing—fiveof which are reflected in the Standards for Technological Literacy10. The conceptual frameworklaid out in this paper and its widespread dissemination by Epsilon Pi Tau were important steps inthe transition to Technology Education.Delmar Olson, one of Warner’s doctoral advisees, took the profession a step closer to the“curriculum to reflect technology, with his 1957 doctoral thesis, Technology and IA: Derivationof Subject Matter from Technology with Implications for IA11, later published by Prentice-Hall(Olson, 1963). Olson described a curriculum grounded in “technology” and reiterated the“general education” goals in the six “functions” he identified as the technical, occupational,consumer, recreation, cultural, and
of 163 high schoolstudents participated, with 46 coming from the targeted schools. The participants included 109(67%) males and 54 (33%) females. The ethnicity breakdown included 16 (10%) AfricanAmericans, and 32 (20%) Hispanics. While not reflecting the demographics of the Texas highschool population, this breakdown is more diverse than the 2007 COE enrollment numbers.The camp agenda included tours/demonstrations with each of the engineering departments, andteam design projects. For the design projects, the participants were divided into teams of 4 or 5and assigned to 1 of 3 design projects. The projects included: design and assessment of a solarcar, a laser communication system, and industrial fabrication optimization modeling. The
involved in the XXX, partnershipsatisfaction, and perceived impact on teachers, scientists and students. The findingsbelow reflect survey data from 14 of 18 teachers and 19 of 21 volunteers whoparticipated in the XXX program during the 2007-08 academic year. Surveys including5-point Likert scale items and open-ended questions were administered in spring of 2008.The results are summarized below, incorporating both teachers’ and volunteers’perspectives. Table 3 lists Teacher and Volunteer mean ratings for key items.Partnership Data and GoalsMost volunteers visited their teacher-partner’s classroom at least 10 times (although itranged from a few to over 15 times), spending 1-3 hours in the class and 1-2 hours inpreparation for each visit. Thus