Efforts for recruiting and retaining students in engineering programs are evident in many postsecondary institutions around the world. These efforts include outreach programs at both elementary and secondary school level, as well as projects that develop capacities beyond technical content-often taught as declarative and procedural knowledge. The mandate of the Galileo Education Network Association includes the design of rich learning environments engaging K - 12 students in authentic tasks: tasks that resemble the real work of professionals such as engineers. We describe the experience of enacting a seven-session engineering project in thermodynamics with Grade Ten students. The initial project resulted from the collaboration-as a means for teacher professional development-between this network association and the mathematics and science teachers in a western Canadian high school. We propose that programs for teacher professional development in mathematics and science should include a focus on tasks that resemble the work of engineering in order to design authentic, engaging learning tasks. Click Here
Instruction at both school and undergraduate levels has traditionally focused on declarative and procedural knowledge, especially for STEM subject areas. For instance, Barak reported in the result of a professional development program for 150 high school teachers. A questionnaire applied during the program revealed that teachers tended to spend much more time in class developing declarative and procedural knowledge (73%), than conceptual and qualitative knowledge (27%). The traditional approach of teaching first concepts and definitions has been widely critique by academics in educational research and there is still a debate on which type of knowledge students should developed first—see.
Underrepresented minority students, notably African Americans, are less likely to graduate inscience and engineering fields compared to members of other racial groups. In engineering,onlyabout 32% of African Americans who intended to major in engineering receivea degree. Manyminorities who leave engineering may not persist to any undergraduate degree. Among students who entered STEM undergraduate majors, 35.2% of Black students and 31.6%of Hispanic students left postsecondary education without any degree (STEM or otherwise) compared to 24.6% of Caucasian students. Part of the racial disparity in STEM persistence may be linked toinequalities in primary and secondary education, including K-12 teacher quality, curriculum,class size and school size. View More Info
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