2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The first exposure to engineering that most K-12 students have is in the classroom. However, K-12 teachers typically have limited or no experience with engineering or engineering education. As a result, they commonly hold many misconceptions about engineering as a field and a low self-efficacy with teaching engineering, which makes them reluctant to include engineering in the curriculum at more than a very superficial level. This leads to a lack of interest in engineering among K-12 students. Consequently, there is an urgent and critical need to provide more exposure to engineering and training in how to teach engineering to both pre-service and in-service K-12 teachers.
In this study, a new course was created in which pre-service teachers and engineering undergraduate students collaborated to develop engineering-focused activities for use in K-12 classrooms and support local K-12 schools and communities by facilitating after-school engineering clubs and family STEM nights. This course intentionally created a hybrid community of practice, and this project explored the ways in which participation in this hybrid community of practice impacted pre-service teachers’ perceptions of engineering and engineering teaching self-efficacy. To assess this impact, a survey designed to measure engineering teaching self-efficacy was completed by 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 confidence in their ability to teach engineering. All reflective journals were collected and analyzed qualitatively using an open coding method to identify common themes in the responses.
Based on quantitative survey results, the self-efficacy of pre-service teachers with teaching engineering increased as a result of participating in this course. Furthermore, qualitative analysis of reflective journal entries revealed that pre-service teachers felt more confident in their ability to teach engineering after completing the course, with many indicating that the course increased both their self-efficacy and understanding of engineering as a field. Participants also stated that they felt more prepared to talk about engineering with K-12 students, and that they understood the importance of incorporating engineering into their future courses.