is Director of CIESE, where she manages program development and implementation and guides collaborations with K-12 schools and other educational partners. She is also leading the RIEE, Research & Innovation in Engineering Education, initiative at Stevens, aimed at strengthening teaching and learning in undergraduate education at Stevens.
She has led several national and statewide K-14 teacher professional development and curriculum development programs in STEM education. McKay is co-PI and Project Director for the NSF-funded Build IT Scale Up project to develop and disseminate an innovative underwater robotics curriculum for middle and high school students. She is a former practicing engineer with high school science and mathematics teaching experience.
Engineering Our Future New Jersey (EOFNJ), an ongoing statewide initiative to infuse engineering into K-12 science, mathematics, and technology curricula, has recently concluded a three-year effort to reach 2,000 elementary, middle, and high school education professionals with professional development activities and an awareness-building campaign. This program, which has focused on teacher professional development using a variety of exemplary K-12 engineering curricula with varying degrees of intensity and classroom support, has reached more than 2,400 education professionals. Quantitative and qualitative results of a multifaceted study of EOFNJ are reported in this paper to demonstrate the impact such programs can have on education and to provide insight on establishing and nurturing these programs through the example set by two school districts.
This paper examines pre-and post-student learning of science, programming, and engineering concepts using a tightly integrated robotics curriculum that challenges student teams to design, build, program, test, and redesign robots as part of a series of increasingly sophisticated design challenges. Data from over 750 middle school and high school youth from both in-school and out-of-school environments during the third year of implementation of a national scale-up project indicate that student post-test scores for the science and programming concept areas increased, but only to just above 50 percent of the total possible scores. Although a large majority of students found the curriculum highly enjoyable and felt they had learned, and teachers agreed, the degree of learning was not reflected in the assessment scores. Furthermore, although educators felt that the curriculum had helped their students learn engineering design through hands-on activities, student results did not show increases in learning of the Engineering Design Process. This suggests that more explicit instruction in science and programming content and the engineering design process may be required for deeper learning.
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