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Introduction The American engineering student faces an exciting and unpredictable future. Dwindling natural and economic resources, rapidly evolving technologies, and a well educated, globally distributed global workforce represent significant challenges to the status quo of U.S. engineering and engineering education. Meeting these challenges requires a transformation of how engineering is taught. Strong domain knowledge and technical expertise no longer make a well-rounded engineer; the rapid pace of change in science and engineeringalso requires high levels of ingenuity and adaptivity. Learning scientists describe these dual capabilities as “adaptive expertise” (AE). Adaptive experts are innovative: they are able to creatively leverage their experience and perform well in novel and fluid situations. They are also efficient: they apply their core taxonomic knowledge appropriately and expeditiously. Common engineering educational methods succeed well at developing either efficiency (e.g., traditional lecture-based instruction) or innovation (e.g., problem-based instruction, or PBI). Our prior research demonstrated that a semester of challenge-based instruction (CBI) develops both innovation and efficiency in students (Martin et al., 2006). However, the positive results shown for developing innovation and efficiency must transfer beyond the classroom to have lasting impact. Do CBI learning experiences place learners on a trajectory towards demonstrating adaptive expertise in the workplace, after they have left the classroom? We are examining this question in the context of the UTeach Engineering National Science Foundation Math and Science Partnership (MSP) in-service teacher program. The MSP is a partnership between The University of Texas at Austin's School of Engineering, College of Education, and UTeach Natural Sciences program and the Austin Independent School District. These partners are collaborating to develop and deliver an innovative design- based curriculum for preparing secondary teachers of engineering. The participants in this study were high school teachers in the first cohort of the UTeach Engineering Summer Institutes for Teachers (ESIT) program. The 23 participants had an average of six years classroom experience teaching mathematics or science. While some of the teachers were also teaching engineering or engineering-related courses, most were preparing for their first experience in an engineering classroom. The six-week ESIT consisted of a pair of integrated design challenge based courses: Fundamentals of Engineering Design and Problem Solving and the Project-Based Lesson Development. Our primary research questions were 1) was the ESIT successful in improving teachers’ innovation and efficiency and 2) does this change translate to teacher practice? Our results are primarily descriptive due to low sample sizes and inconsistency in response rates on pre- and post measures. However, our results suggest that teachers efficiency and innovation in engineering improved during the ESIT. Teachers significantly improved on measures of basic engineering knowledge and pedagogy from pre- to posttest. We also found that teachers increased the student-centeredness of their

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Martin, T., & Benton, T., & McKenna, W., & Ko, P. (2010, June), Transfer Of Adaptive Expertise To Transform Engineering Education Paper presented at 2010 Annual Conference & Exposition, Louisville, Kentucky. 10.18260/1-2--16881