The Engineering Design Process: Conceptions Along the Learning-to-Teach Continuum

In this study, I sought to identify differences in the views and understandings of engineering design among individuals along the learning-to-teach continuum. To do so, I conducted a comprehensive review of literature to determine the various aspects of engineering design described in the fields of professional engineering and engineering education. Additionally, I reviewed literature on the methods used in teaching engineering design at the secondary (grade 7-12) level – to describe the various models used in classrooms, even before the implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013). Last, I defined four groups along the learning-to-teach continuum: prospective, preservice, and practicing teachers, as well as teacher educators.The context of this study centered around a California public university, including an internship program where undergraduates engaged with practicing mentor teachers in science and engineering teaching at local high schools, and a teacher education program where secondary science preservice teachers and the teacher educators who taught them participated. Interviews were conducted with all participants to gain insights into their views and understandings of engineering design. Prospective and preservice teachers were interviewed multiple times throughout the year and completed concept maps of the engineering design process multiple times as well; practicing teachers and teacher educators were interviewed once.Three levels of analyses were conducted. I identified 30 aspects of engineering discussed by participants. Through phenomenographic methods, I also constructed six conceptual categories for engineering design to organize those aspects most commonly discussed. These categories were combined to demonstrate a participant’s view of engineering design (e.g., business focused, human centered, creative, etc.) as well as their complexity of understanding of engineering design overall (the more categories their ideas fit within, the more complex their understanding was thought to be).I found that the most commonly referenced aspects of engineering design were in line with the three main dimensions described in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013). I also found that the practicing teacher participants overall conveyed the most complex and integrated understandings of engineering design, with the undergraduate, prospective teachers not far behind. One of the most important factors related to a more integrated understanding of engineering design was having formal engineering experience, especially in the form of conducting engineering research or having been a professional engineer. Further, I found that female participants were more likely than their male counterparts to view engineering as having a human element—recognizing the need to collaborate with others throughout the process and the need to think about the potential user of the product the engineer is solving the problem for. These findings suggest that prior experience with engineering, and not experience in the classroom or with engineering education, tends to lead to a deeper, more authentic view of engineering. Finally, I close with a discussion of the overall findings, limitations of the study, potential implications, and future work

The Needle is Moving in CA K-8 Science: Integration with ELA, Integration of the Sciences, and Returning Science as a K-8 Core Subject

This first EII evaluation publication discusses one of the major shifts above, namely the shift to integrated instruction. The integration of science and ELA is the focus of one section, and the integration of the science disciplines (i.e., earth/space, life, and physical) inherent in the MS Integrated Model is the focus of the second. Also discussed at length in this publication is a fundamental shift that is not listed above, but is equally, if not more, important: the need to teach science in the first place. In order for any of the targeted shifts to take place, teachers must devote time to teaching science on a regular basis

Administrators Matter in NGSS Implementation (2019): Updated Findings on How School and District Leaders Are Making Science Happen

Administrators need learning opportunities if they are to adequately understand the substantial shifts of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and support teachers in implementing them. Accordingly, the K-8 NGSS Early Implementers Initiative has consistently expanded the professional learning it provides for administrators, particularly for site administrators, who generally have the most contact with teachers. This tenth evaluation report in the series, intended for site and district administrators and state leaders, highlights:- The professional learning strategies used by the Initiative to engage and empower administrators to support NGSS implementation (includes two district vignettes)- The impact of the professional learning on administrator understanding and actions- The challenges experienced by the Initiative in trying to involve administrators- Recommendations for increasing administrator help with science implementatio

The Synergy of Science and English Language Arts: Means and Mutual Benefits of Integration

The California K-8 NGSS Early Implementers Initiative (known in short as the Early Implementers Initiative) is equipping teachers to richly integrate science and English language arts (ELA). In fact, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) as well as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) clearly call for such integration.The nature of the NGSS and their recommended instructional approaches readily enable powerful ELA learning for all students. In a dramatic departure from science instruction that emphasizes scientific information and facts, NGSS science has students working as scientists to make sense of phenomena in the natural world. The NGSS approach requires a lot of lively discussion, critical reading, and thoughtful writing and drawing. Initiative teachers have clearly demonstrated that integrated science instruction is accessible to English learners and that these learners get strong ELA benefits from science instruction.While the Initiative equips teachers to integrate science and ELA, it does not call for all science instruction to be a concerted blending of science and ELA. Indeed, teachers reported that half of their science instructional time was stand-alone science.As a member of the State Board of Education commented during an advisory board meeting for the Initiative's evaluation: "Everyone is saying you should integrate science and ELA, but what does that actually look like in the classroom?" This report -- intended for state and district leaders, including principals -- addresses that question and several others highlighted below. To get answers, the evaluation team observed all key professional development sessions and 20 classroom lessons, surveyed over 500 teachers, interviewed Initiative leaders, and more

Six Years of Scaling Up: Districtwide Implementations of the Next Generation Science Standards

Many educational initiatives are funded for only a couple of years. The California NGSS Early Implementers Initiative spanned an extraordinary six years, during which eight school districts worked toward districtwide implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), which call for teachers to transform their instructional practice. This 12th report in our evaluation series for policymakers, school and district administrators, and professional learning specialists describes the Initiative's scale-up in its later years to reach all K-8 science teachers. Specifically, the report addresses the following questions:In contrast to focusing in Years 1-4 on developing Teacher Leaders, what strategies did districts use in Years 5-6 to reach all other K-8 teachers of science (called "expansion teachers" in this report)?What impacts has the Initiative had on expansion teachers?Which professional learning strategies have been most and least effective for influencing the practice of expansion teachers?What special attention was paid to providing administrators with professional learning to prompt their support of NGSS implementation

What Education Leaders Can Learn About NGSS Implementation: Highlights From the Early Implementers Initiative

From 2014 through 2020, eight diverse school districts and two charter management organizations ran a substantial experiment with ways of implementing the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in elementary and middle grades, called the California K - 8 NGSS Early Implementers Initiative. The Initiative certainly illustrated that a big financial investment can produce powerful change. However, even districts facing resource challenges may benefit from the lessons that were learned and the strategies that were developed by the Initiative.An external evaluation team has previously released a series of reports on what can be learned from the efforts of the Initiative districts. All reports are intended to be helpful to administrators at the school and district levels, education policymakers, and people charged with designing and/or delivering science professional learning. After briefly describing how the NGSS call for big shifts in science teaching and learning, this highlights report shares high-level, major learnings from the evaluation, distilled into only a couple dozen pages of main narrative. The report describes NGSS instruction as a powerful lever for equitable learning, explains how the Initiative made this kind of instruction happen, and describes the importance of the Initiative's ambitious professional learning for administrators

Readout of a quantum processor with high dynamic range Josephson parametric amplifiers

We demonstrate a high dynamic range Josephson parametric amplifier (JPA) in which the active nonlinear element is implemented using an array of rf-SQUIDs. The device is matched to the 50 $\Omega$ environment with a Klopfenstein-taper impedance transformer and achieves a bandwidth of 250-300 MHz, with input saturation powers up to -95 dBm at 20 dB gain. A 54-qubit Sycamore processor was used to benchmark these devices, providing a calibration for readout power, an estimate of amplifier added noise, and a platform for comparison against standard impedance matched parametric amplifiers with a single dc-SQUID. We find that the high power rf-SQUID array design has no adverse effect on system noise, readout fidelity, or qubit dephasing, and we estimate an upper bound on amplifier added noise at 1.6 times the quantum limit. Lastly, amplifiers with this design show no degradation in readout fidelity due to gain compression, which can occur in multi-tone multiplexed readout with traditional JPAs.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure

Measurement-Induced State Transitions in a Superconducting Qubit: Within the Rotating Wave Approximation

Superconducting qubits typically use a dispersive readout scheme, where a resonator is coupled to a qubit such that its frequency is qubit-state dependent. Measurement is performed by driving the resonator, where the transmitted resonator field yields information about the resonator frequency and thus the qubit state. Ideally, we could use arbitrarily strong resonator drives to achieve a target signal-to-noise ratio in the shortest possible time. However, experiments have shown that when the average resonator photon number exceeds a certain threshold, the qubit is excited out of its computational subspace, which we refer to as a measurement-induced state transition. These transitions degrade readout fidelity, and constitute leakage which precludes further operation of the qubit in, for example, error correction. Here we study these transitions using a transmon qubit by experimentally measuring their dependence on qubit frequency, average photon number, and qubit state, in the regime where the resonator frequency is lower than the qubit frequency. We observe signatures of resonant transitions between levels in the coupled qubit-resonator system that exhibit noisy behavior when measured repeatedly in time. We provide a semi-classical model of these transitions based on the rotating wave approximation and use it to predict the onset of state transitions in our experiments. Our results suggest the transmon is excited to levels near the top of its cosine potential following a state transition, where the charge dispersion of higher transmon levels explains the observed noisy behavior of state transitions. Moreover, occupation in these higher energy levels poses a major challenge for fast qubit reset

Overcoming leakage in scalable quantum error correction

Leakage of quantum information out of computational states into higher energy states represents a major challenge in the pursuit of quantum error correction (QEC). In a QEC circuit, leakage builds over time and spreads through multi-qubit interactions. This leads to correlated errors that degrade the exponential suppression of logical error with scale, challenging the feasibility of QEC as a path towards fault-tolerant quantum computation. Here, we demonstrate the execution of a distance-3 surface code and distance-21 bit-flip code on a Sycamore quantum processor where leakage is removed from all qubits in each cycle. This shortens the lifetime of leakage and curtails its ability to spread and induce correlated errors. We report a ten-fold reduction in steady-state leakage population on the data qubits encoding the logical state and an average leakage population of less than $1 \times 10^{-3}$ throughout the entire device. The leakage removal process itself efficiently returns leakage population back to the computational basis, and adding it to a code circuit prevents leakage from inducing correlated error across cycles, restoring a fundamental assumption of QEC. With this demonstration that leakage can be contained, we resolve a key challenge for practical QEC at scale.Comment: Main text: 7 pages, 5 figure

Suppressing quantum errors by scaling a surface code logical qubit

Practical quantum computing will require error rates that are well below what is achievable with physical qubits. Quantum error correction offers a path to algorithmically-relevant error rates by encoding logical qubits within many physical qubits, where increasing the number of physical qubits enhances protection against physical errors. However, introducing more qubits also increases the number of error sources, so the density of errors must be sufficiently low in order for logical performance to improve with increasing code size. Here, we report the measurement of logical qubit performance scaling across multiple code sizes, and demonstrate that our system of superconducting qubits has sufficient performance to overcome the additional errors from increasing qubit number. We find our distance-5 surface code logical qubit modestly outperforms an ensemble of distance-3 logical qubits on average, both in terms of logical error probability over 25 cycles and logical error per cycle ($2.914\%\pm 0.016\%$ compared to $3.028\%\pm 0.023\%$). To investigate damaging, low-probability error sources, we run a distance-25 repetition code and observe a $1.7\times10^{-6}$ logical error per round floor set by a single high-energy event ($1.6\times10^{-7}$ when excluding this event). We are able to accurately model our experiment, and from this model we can extract error budgets that highlight the biggest challenges for future systems. These results mark the first experimental demonstration where quantum error correction begins to improve performance with increasing qubit number, illuminating the path to reaching the logical error rates required for computation.Comment: Main text: 6 pages, 4 figures. v2: Update author list, references, Fig. S12, Table I