2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

To help remove barriers to engineering career pathways, foster a sense of belonging in the field, develop important skills for student success in any career they may choose, and ultimately create a transformed engineering workforce that can better serve the whole of society, it can be critical to act early in the educational experiences provided for our nation’s youth. While initiatives to engage children in engineering learning experiences over the last couple decades have been encouraging and millions of students participate in formalized P-12 engineering-related courses, there has been uncertainty as to how engineering should be intentionally taught across schools in a coherent manner. To help fill this void, the Framework for P-12 Engineering Learning was published in 2020 by the American Society for Engineering Education. This framework is positioned to offer a unifying vision and guidance for informing state and local decisions to enhance the purposefulness, coherency, and equity of engineering teaching and learning. While the framework supplies the potential “endpoints” for each component of engineering literacy (i.e., habits of mind, practices, and knowledge) and details what students could learn by the end of secondary school, it does not specify a potential blueprint of how the engineering concepts and sub-concepts may be related and build upon each other to arrive at these endpoints. Accordingly, following the review of literature and the collection of insights from a variety of engineering education stakeholders, including teachers, professors, and industry representatives, an Engineering Performance Matrix (EPM) conceptual model was created to provide an instructional/assessment blueprint for engineering programs/initiatives. In addition, an EPM for each engineering concept found within the framework was drafted to help teachers scaffold learning to their students’ needs and progress teaching toward a targeted performance goal. This paper will highlight the research and development work that was enacted to draft the EPMs and discuss how they can be used for developing engineering lessons and activities as well as aligning/scoping P-12 engineering programs.