Public perception of engineering recognizes its importance to national and international competitiveness, economy, quality of life, security, and other fundamental areas of impact; but uncertainty about engineering among the general public remains. Federal funding trends for education underscore many of the concerns regarding teaching and learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics subjects in primary through grade 12 (P-12) education. Conflicting perspectives on the essential attributes that comprise the engineering design process results in a lack of coherent criteria against which teachers and administrators can measure the validity of a resource, or assess its strengths and weaknesses, or grasp incongruities among competing process models. The literature suggests two basic approaches for representing engineering design: a phase-based, life cycle-oriented approach; and an activity-based, cognitive approach. Although these approaches serve various teaching and functional goals in undergraduate and graduate engineering education, as well as in practice, they tend to exacerbate the gaps in P-12 engineering efforts, where appropriate learning objectives that connect meaningfully to engineering are poorly articulated or understood. In this article, we examine some fundamental problems that must be resolved if preengineering is to enter the P-12 curriculum with meaningful standards and is to be connected through learning outcomes, shared understanding of engineering design, and other vestiges to vertically link P-12 engineering with higher education and the practice of engineering. We also examine historical aspects, various pedagogies, and current issues pertaining to undergraduate and graduate engineering programs. As a case study, we hope to shed light on various kinds of interventions and outreach efforts to inform these efforts or at least provide some insight into major factors that shape and define the environment and cultures of the two institutions (including epistemic perspectives, institutional objectives, and political constraints) that are very different and can compromise collaborative efforts between the institutions of P-12 and higher education.
This paper describes the development, pilot offering, and initial assessment of a first-year composition course, Essentials of College Rhetoric, specifically designed to provide students entering engineering programs at Texas Tech University with the critical reading and writing skills and rhetorical strategies traditionally taught in first-year composition. However, this course differs from traditional composition courses in that it shares curriculum and assignments with the introductory electrical engineering course, Introduction to Engineering and Computer Programming, and not only underscores the role of engineers as writers in the workplace by teaching documentation conventions common to engineering practice, but also requires students to think and write critically about ethical, political, and other issues that shape the role of engineering in our culture.
The Texas Tech University College of Engineering has been working for five years to develop and implement our Pre-college Engineering/Architecture Academy Program for K-12 institutions, but it was only when we began a teacher training program did the Academy begin to solidify into a program that empowers teachers to integrate engineering concepts and principles into the K-12 classroom.The Glenn Commission Report [1], the 2004 ASEE K-12 Workshop [2], NSF funding trends, and a growing number of other sources indicate wide consensus that the quality of K-12 teacher preparation needs to be improved---especially in the areas of math and science---and that the number of teachers teaching out of their disciplines is alarmingly high. In addition, very few public school teachers have a clear concept of the knowledge, skills, and disciplinary areas that define engineering, so teachers are typically ill-equipped to advise students about engineering careers and almost certainly lack the skills to develop hands-on activities that demonstrate engineering concepts. As an engineering college we found our expertise in developing engineering course content that worked within the myriad of constraints of K-12 environments is limited, at best. Hiring K-12 teachers to work with us in developing engineering resources within the core K-12 disciplines-math, science, language arts, and social sciences-has allowed us to train teachers to incorporate engineering content that aligns with state standards, so teachers are not required to create new courses, but to incorporate engineering into what they are already teaching. By partnering with K-12 institutions in Texas, we have been able to form a cadre of teachers to develop and teach the workshops as well as develop resource guides that align engineering content to state standards. This paper will discuss forming this cadre of teachers and developing the resources that support teacher training.
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