Lessons Learned from Two Teacher Educators: What COVID-19 Can Teach Us About Preparing Elementary Preservice Teachers to Teach the Next Generation of Students

Over the last two years, the COVID-19 pandemic has required teacher educators to teach their classes online. Teacher educators now need to reflect on the learning opportunities that the COVID-19 induced shift to online learning has provided. This study shares two teacher educators’ experiences of teaching and supporting preservice teachers (PSTs) as they taught engineering online to elementary students. The two teacher educators noticed (a) positive changes in PSTs’ attitudes and beliefs about technology integration, (b) PSTs’ tendency to select and use of educational technologies, (c) PSTs’ recognition of the importance of online interaction and feedback from K-12 students, (d) the importance of providing PSTs with extended access to physical hardware, and (e) the importance of providing developmentally appropriate digital resources. The paper concludes with suggestions for teacher educators who are preparing PSTs for the next generation of teaching

Why Do Students Attend STEM Clubs, What Do They Get Out of It, and Where Are They Heading?

This research investigated what motivated and sustained the involvement of 376 students in culturally relevant, afterschool STEM clubs at four rural, under-resourced schools. A longitudinal, convergent parallel mixed methods research design was used to investigate participants’ participation in and perceptions of the clubs, their motivations to attend, and their future goals, over three years. Situated Expectancy-Value Theory (SEVT) served as a guiding theoretical and analytical framework. Overall, students who attended the clubs were African American (55%), female (56%), and 6th graders (42%), attended approximately half of the clubs (43%), and agreed with quality measures on the STEM Club Survey (M = 4.0/5). Students interviewed (n = 131) were most likely (99%) to describe what they enjoyed (intrinsic value), what was useful to them (utility value; 55%), personally important (42%; attainment value), or related to their personal or collective identity (40%). Most participants (78%) planned to attend a 4-year university and expressed interest in at least one STEM career (77%); highest attendees (48%) expressed the most interest. Our study reveals that a culturally relevant, afterschool STEM club can motivate underserved students to participate, learn, feel a sense of belonging as a club member, and positively influence their college and career pathways

The First Year of an Undergraduate Service Learning Partnership to Enhance Engineering Education and Elementary Pre-Service Teacher Education

This IUSE project was designed to address three major challenges faced by undergraduate engineering students (UES) and pre-service teachers (PSTs): 1) retention for UESs after the first year, and continued engagement when they reach more difficult concepts, 2) to prepare PSTs to teach engineering, which is a requirement in the Next Generation Science Standards as well as many state level standards of learning, and 3) to prepare both groups of students to communicate and collaborate in a multi-disciplinary context, which is a necessary skill in their future places of work. This project was implemented in three pairs of classes: 1) an introductory mechanical engineering class, fulfilling a general education requirement for information literacy and a foundations class in education, 2) fluid mechanics in mechanical engineering technology and a science methods class in education, and 3) mechanical engineering courses requiring programming (e.g., computational methods and robotics) with an educational technology class. All collaborations taught elementary level students (4th or 5th grade). For collaborations 1 and 2, the elementary students came to campus for a field trip where they toured engineering labs and participated in a one-hour lesson taught by both the UESs and PSTs. In collaboration 3, the UESs and PSTs worked with the upper-elementary students in their school during an afterschool club. In collaborations 1 and 2, students were assigned to teams and worked remotely on some parts of the project. A collaboration tool, built in Google Sites and Google Drive, was used to facilitate the project completion. The collaboration tool includes a team repository for all the project documents and templates. Students in collaboration 3 worked together directly during class time on smaller assignments. In all three collaborations lesson plans were implemented using the BSCS 5E instructional model, which was aligned to the engineering design process. Instruments were developed to assess knowledge in collaborations 1 (engineering design process) and 3 (computational thinking), while in collaboration 2, knowledge was assessed with questions from the fundamentals of engineering exam and a science content assessment. Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness (CATME) was also used in all 3 collaborations to assess teamwork across the collaborations. Finally, each student wrote a reflection on their experiences, which was used to qualitatively assess the project impact. The results from the first full semester of implementation have led us to improvements in the implementation and instrument refinement for year 2

EIPECK: Assessing Educators’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Engineering Integration in K-12

Global efforts are underway to include engineering in pre-college curricula. In the USA, this pursuit led to the inclusion of engineering content in the most recent version of the Next Generation Science Standards that guide K-12 science. As these standards become part of the K-12 curriculum, teachers face the challenge of gaining basic engineering literacy, while developing the associated inclusive pedagogies necessary to integrate engineering content into their classrooms. In this context, teacher preparation programs can benefit from easy-to-implement tools that measure preservice teachers’ readiness to integrate engineering content in their future classrooms. This work describes the development and validation of an instrument to help assess educators’ perceived levels of pedagogical content knowledge for engineering integration at single or multiple time points throughout their academic preparation. The proposed instrument can complement other assessment methods, such as classroom observations, interviews, and journal entries. Additionally, the instrument can be used to help discern the effectiveness of teacher preparation programs in preparing future teachers to integrate engineering

COVID-19 as a Magnifying Glass: Exploring the Importance of Relationships as Education Students Learn and Teach Robotics via Zoom

Ed+gineering, an NSF-funded program, adapted hands-on robotics instruction for online delivery in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This qualitative multiple case study shares the experiences of participating education students in spring 2021 as they collaborated virtually with engineering students and fifth graders to engineer bioinspired robots in an afterschool technology club adapted to be virtual. The online context reduced the education students’ interactions with people other than the engineering students and fifth graders on their team and thus positioned COVID-19 as a metaphorical magnifying glass amplifying the critical role that these relationships played in influencing the project’s outcomes. Through analyzing short-answer reflections, the researchers observed patterns in the ways the education students’ interactions with their engineering and fifth-grade partners shaped their teaching self-efficacy and intention to integrate engineering and coding. Education students appeared to gain the most self-efficacy from feeling supported by, but not dependent upon, their engineering partners, and from adopting engineering-teaching roles. Satisfying interactions with fifth graders and successful production of functioning robots appeared to enhance education students’ intention to integrate engineering and coding into their future instruction. Education students reported gaining self-efficacy for both engineering and coding during the experience, but were more likely to report feeling confident about teaching engineering than teaching coding at the project’s end. Implications and lessons learned are shared, which may be particularly relevant for educators who prepare elementary education students to teach engineering in K-6 settings

Enhancing Teamwork Skills Through an Interdisciplinary Engineering Service Learning Collaboration

The purpose of this research paper is to explore whether participation in an interdisciplinary collaboration program partnering Preservice Teachers (PST) and Undergraduate Engineering Students (UES) results in an increase in teamwork effectiveness. The interdisciplinary collaboration was designed as a service-learning project within existing undergraduate programs that included the development and delivery of engineering content to a K-12 audience. The collaborations were integrated into existing courses in two colleges, engineering and education. The Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scale (BARS) version of the Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness (CATME) was used midway and at the end of the project to evaluate teamwork effectiveness. Results of the analysis indicated that both PST and UES were rated significantly higher in team-member effectiveness at the end of the project across four of five factors: interacting with team members, keeping the team on track, expecting quality, and having relevant knowledge, skills and abilities. The gain in the teamwork effectiveness did not differ across majors, with both UES and PST showing similar gains. A noticeable positive increase in student attitudes towards the task was also observed between the midway and the end of the project. Findings from this study provide some preliminary evidence that an innovative interdisciplinary service learning experience partnering engineering and education students was conducive to the development of teamwork skills

District Strategic Teaming: Leadership for Systemic and Sustainable Reform

Reform efforts in schools have become increasingly focused on the nature and direction of teamwork in efforts to achieve sustained and systemic districtwide capacity for innovation and needed change. The six-year study reported in this article involved development, implementation, and assessment of a unique collaborative process for districtwide reform in some of the most challenging and fluid educational settings in the United States of America. This reform process, called District Strategic Teaming, involved a representative vertical cross-section of members from the district office to school-based support staff. Participating schools are located in isolated, rural communities in the south-eastern region of the United States of America that experience high rates of teacher turnover and serve student populations living in abject poverty. Despite these challenges, the longitudinal study revealed substantive improvement in organizational culture and reduction of systemic barriers for innovation through the process described in this article

Partnering Undergraduate Engineering Students With Preservice Teachers to Design and Teach an Elementary Engineering Lesson Through Ed+gineering

Major challenges in engineering education include retention of undergraduate engineering students (UESs) and continued engagement after the first year when concepts increase in difficulty. Additionally, employers, as well as ABET, look for students to demonstrate non-technical skills, including the ability to work successfully in groups, the ability to communicate both within and outside their discipline, and the ability to find information that will help them solve problems and contribute to lifelong learning. Teacher education is also facing challenges given the recent incorporation of engineering practices and core ideas into the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and state level standards of learning. To help teachers meet these standards in their classrooms, education courses for preservice teachers (PSTs) must provide resources and opportunities to increase science and engineering knowledge, and the associated pedagogies. To address these challenges, Ed+gineering, an NSF-funded multidisciplinary collaborative service learning project, was implemented into two sets of paired-classes in engineering and education: a 100 level mechanical engineering class (n = 42) and a foundations class in education (n = 17), and a fluid mechanics class in mechanical engineering technology (n = 23) and a science methods class (n = 15). The paired classes collaborated in multidisciplinary teams of 5-8 undergraduate students to plan and teach engineering lessons to local elementary school students. Teams completed a series of previously tested, scaffolded activities to guide their collaboration. Designing and delivering lessons engaged university students in collaborative processes that promoted social learning, including researching and planning, peer mentoring, teaching and receiving feedback, and reflecting and revising their engineering lesson. The research questions examined in this pilot, mixed-methods research study include: (1) How did PSTs’ Ed+gineering experiences influence their engineering and science knowledge?; (2) How did PSTs’ and UESs’ Ed+gineering experiences influence their pedagogical understanding?; and (3) What were PSTs’ and UESs’ overall perceptions of their Ed+gineering experiences? Both quantitative (e.g., Engineering Design Process assessment, Science Content Knowledge assessment) and qualitative (student reflections) data were used to assess knowledge gains and project perceptions following the semester-long intervention. Findings suggest that the PSTs were more aware and comfortable with the engineering field following lesson development and delivery, and often better able to explain particular science/engineering concepts. Both PSTs and UESs, but especially the latter, came to realize the importance of planning and preparing lessons to be taught to an audience. UESs reported greater appreciation for the work of educators. PSTs and UESs expressed how they learned to work in groups with multidisciplinary members—this is a valuable lesson for their respective professional careers. Yearly, the Ed+gineering research team will also request and review student retention reports in their respective programs to assess project impact

The Influence of Participation in a Multi-Disciplinary Collaborative Service Learning Project on the Effectiveness of Team Members in a 100-level Mechanical Engineering Class

Engineers need to develop professional skills, including the ability to work successfully in teams and to communicate within and outside of their discipline, in addition to required technical skills. A collaborative multi-disciplinary service learning project referred to as Ed+gineering was implemented in a 100-level mechanical engineering course. In this collaboration, mechanical engineering students, primarily in the second semester of their freshman year or first semester of their second year, worked over the course of a semester with education students taking a foundations course to develop and deliver engineering lessons to fourth or fifth graders. Students in comparison engineering classes worked on a team project focused on experimental design for a small satellite system. The purpose of this study was to determine if participating in the Ed+gineering collaboration had a positive effect on teamwork effectiveness and satisfaction when compared to the comparison class. In both team projects, the five dimensions of the Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness (CATME) system were used as a quantitative assessment. The five dimensions of CATME Behaviorally Anchored Ratings Scale (BARS) (contribution to the team’s work, interacting with teammates, keeping the team on track, expecting quality, and having relevant Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities - KSAs) were measured. Additionally, within the CATME platform team satisfaction, team interdependence and team cohesiveness were measured. ANCOVA analysis was used to assess the quantitative data from CATME. Preliminary results suggest that students in the treatment classes had higher team member effectiveness and overall satisfaction scores than students in the comparison classes. Qualitative data from reflections written at the completion of the aforementioned projects were used to explore these results

Enhancing Preservice Teachers\u27 Intention to Integrate Engineering Through a Multi-Disciplinary Partnership (Evaluation)

Driven by the need to broaden participation and increase recruitment in STEM fields, considerable efforts are underway to promote the infusion of engineering into elementary and secondary grade levels. The benefits of engineering education and the strong support from professional and educational groups are well documented, yet the actual integration of engineering content in the K-12 setting remains a challenge. Pre-college educator programs that train future teachers are a natural target for the integration efforts. Although elementary educators recognize the importance of integrating engineering in their classrooms, they often lack the confidence to teach engineering content. The absence of effective engineering instruction in teacher preparation programs leaves future educators unprepared for this challenge. Ed+gineering is an NSF-funded partnership between education and engineering students and faculty aimed at increasing preservice teacher (PST) preparation, confidence, and intention to integrate engineering into their teaching. The project partners education and engineering students at three points in their professional preparation within the context of their respective university courses. As part of their coursework, small cross-disciplinary teams plan and deliver culturally responsive engineering lessons to elementary school students. This paper investigates the impact of Ed+gineering on PSTs’ knowledge of engineering practices, self-efficacy to integrate engineering, pedagogical knowledge, beliefs about engineering integration, and engineering pedagogy. ANCOVA analysis was used to assess the impact of Ed+gineering on participating PSTs. Data was collected from three collaborations involving students in engineering and education during Spring 2020. A validated survey was used to assess the variables of interest. Preliminary results suggest that the Ed+gineering partnership had a positive impact on engineering pedagogical knowledge, general pedagogical knowledge, knowledge of engineering practices, and self-efficacy for integrating engineering. The specific magnitude of the impact and its implications will be discussed in this paper