2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In recent years, engineering has been increasingly incorporated into K-12 classrooms, even though K-12 teachers commonly have no prior experience with engineering or training in how to teach engineering. Therefore, schools cannot scale their programs to meet the criteria needed to teach engineering effectively. As a result, many teachers hold common misconceptions about what engineers do and have low self-efficacy with teaching engineering, leading to a lack of interest in engineering among K-12 students. Research indicates that students tend to hold stereotypical and narrow perceptions of engineering, which in turn limits their interest in engineering as a future career choice. Previous research indicates that to improve engineering literacy in the United States and support the professional formation of engineers, there is a critical need to provide engineering education training to pre-service teachers, especially those mathematics and science teachers who are most likely to be teaching standalone engineering courses and other related courses where engineering practices can be most effectively integrated into the curriculum. However, there are currently very few colleges of education that provide any training to prepare pre-service teachers to teach engineering.
In this study, pre-service teachers and engineering undergraduate students worked together to learn about engineering education and develop engineering-focused activities for use in K-12 classrooms. A new course model was created that utilized a hybrid community of practice where students learned about engineering education and worked together to support local K-12 schools by engaging in service learning. This project explored the ways in which participation in this course impacted pre-service teachers’ perceptions of engineering and engineering teaching self-efficacy. We first administered a survey designed to measure engineering teaching self-efficacy to pre-service teachers at the beginning and end of the course. In addition, pre-service teachers also completed reflective journals throughout the course in which they were asked to reflect on how specific aspects of the course impacted their understanding of the nature of engineering and their confidence in their ability to teach engineering. Finally, students who completed the course were invited to participate in semi-structured interviews. During interviews, participants were asked about their perceptions of engineering and were asked to sort a list of characteristics that an engineer must or must not have. They were also asked to reflect on their confidence in their ability to teach engineering in the future and on how their perceptions of engineering and self-efficacy had changed after participating in the course. All interview transcripts and reflective journals were analyzed qualitatively using an open coding method to identify common themes in the responses.
The quantitative survey results demonstrated that the engineering teaching self-efficacy of pre-service teachers increased after participating in this course. Furthermore, in both interviews and reflective journals, students indicated that they felt more confident in their ability to teach engineering by the end of the course, with many saying that they now had a better understanding of engineering as a field and how to teach it than they had before. Participants also stated that they felt like more exposure to engineering and training on how to teach engineering would further increase their self-efficacy and willingness to teach engineering in K-12.