BACKGROUNDResearch in engineering education tends to focus on students' factual knowledge about engineering, their interests and attitudes, and on students' conceptions of the engineer and the relation to curriculum development. Thus, it is essential to expand our understanding of students' conceptions about the engineer phenomenon as the foundation for informing STEM education standards and curriculum. PURPOSE (HYPOTHESIS)The purpose of this study was to investigate students' conceptions about engineers specifically: (1) What are elementary school students' conceptions of an engineer? (2) How might students' conceptions vary by grade level, gender, and community setting? (3) What are implications of students' conceptions for engineering education? DESIGN/METHODThis study was descriptive in nature and reflected a cross-age design involving the collection of qualitative data from about 400 Grade 1 through 5 students from urban and suburban schools located in the Midwest, United States. Data were analyzed using content analysis and statistical testing. RESULTSStudents conceptualized an engineer as a mechanic, laborer, and technician. Students' conceptions entailed the engineer fixing, building, or making and using vehicles, engines, and tools. Students' conceptions were relatively consistent across urban and suburban school communities with the exceptions that laborer was more common among urban students and technician was more common among suburban students. More than half of the students who drew a person drew male engineers. CONCLUSIONSA framework for organizing and interpreting students' conceptions is presented. Curricular recommendations and implications are made that build on students' conceptions and reinforce connections between national standards and the engineer concept.

BACKGROUNDThe notion of identity in engineering has become an emerging field in educational research, and many studies focus on the formation of professional engineering identities among undergraduate and career-aged adults, particularly women. Little is known about how pre-adolescents begin to construct their earliest conceptions of engineering and potential career aspirations. Further, there is little research on measuring young learners' engineering identity development. PURPOSEThe purpose of this study was to examine the development of the Engineering Identity Development Scale (EIDS), an instrument designed to assess elementary school students' identity development in engineering. This study describes a three-phase approach to item construction, administration, and the gathering of reliable and valid evidence for scores on the EIDS. DESIGN/METHODItem construction and administration of the instrument were conducted, and tests of reliability (internal consistency) and validity (content and internal structure) of the EIDS's scores were undertaken. The EIDS was intended to include four factors: (1) academic identity, (2) school identity, (3) occupational identity, and 4) engineering aspirations. RESULTSFindings indicate that two rather than four factors best describe young children's identity: academic and engineering career. Results provide initial support for score reliability and validity of the EIDS. CONCLUSIONThe reliability and validity evidence support the proposed use of the EIDS instrument. Recommendations for infusing EIDS into science and engineering education and into research related to gender, identity, and learning in science and engineering education are suggested.

In an effort to document teachers' enactments of new reform in science teaching, valid and scalable measures of science teaching using engineering design are needed. This study describes the development and testing of an approach for documenting and characterizing elementary science teachers' multiday enactments of engineering design-based science teaching. Using the tenets of ambitious teaching, we explore how Grade 4 teachers utilized elements of high-leverage practices in an effort to teach science using engineering design. Data included 33 hours of classroom observations, semistructured interviews, and teacher reflections. Using lesson event, classroom organization, and instructional codes analogous to the literature on the engineering design process, we generated and analyzed classroom event maps, noting trends across multiple and individual teacher classrooms. Results indicated percentages of time spent on different phases within the design process among multiple classrooms as well as consistency across individual cases that demonstrate teachers' capacity to enact ambitious teaching practices through engineering design-based science instruction. Implications suggest that our approach provides a useful method to not only document and characterize engineering design-based science teaching practices but also reveals complexities of leveraging student thinking through ambitious engineering teaching practices.

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