2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In response to Rhode Island’s 2013 adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), a local school district partnered with a liberal arts university to address a key implementation challenge: elementary teachers’ limited familiarity with engineering concepts and practices. An interdisciplinary community-engaged project connected two courses—Sustainable Energy Systems and Teaching Inquiry Science in the Elementary School—so undergraduate engineering and education students could co-design and deliver a five-lesson wind energy unit to eleven fourth-grade classrooms, reaching over 230 students and their teachers.

This study examined changes in undergraduates’ engineering-teaching self-efficacy and their conceptual understanding of the engineering design process. Grounded in experiential and collaborative learning, the project immersed students in authentic classroom practice to build pedagogical confidence and content knowledge.

A one-group pre–post design assessed change using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, a nonparametric method appropriate for ordinal data and small to moderate samples. Pre- and post-assessments adapted from the Teaching Engineering Self-Efficacy Scale were completed by 43 education and 28 engineering students. Results showed statistically significant gains (p < .05) across three self-efficacy dimensions: engineering pedagogical content knowledge, motivational self-efficacy, and outcome expectancy. Education majors exhibited the largest improvements, especially in confidence teaching the engineering design process. Conceptual understanding also increased: correct sequencing of design steps rose from 79.1% to 90.7% for education students and from 92.9% to 100% for engineering students.

Implications include effective design principles for interdisciplinary, community-engaged models that prepare undergraduates to teach engineering and expand K–12 STEM capacity.