
NSF Org: |
EEC Division of Engineering Education and Centers |
Recipient: |
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Initial Amendment Date: | September 12, 2018 |
Latest Amendment Date: | January 13, 2021 |
Award Number: | 1849430 |
Award Instrument: | Continuing Grant |
Program Manager: |
Amelia Greer
agreer@nsf.gov (703)292-2552 EEC Division of Engineering Education and Centers ENG Directorate for Engineering |
Start Date: | October 1, 2018 |
End Date: | September 30, 2022 (Estimated) |
Total Intended Award Amount: | $3,999,410.00 |
Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $4,122,192.00 |
Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2019 = $1,353,114.00 FY 2020 = $1,415,824.00 |
History of Investigator: |
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Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
3112 LEE BUILDING COLLEGE PARK MD US 20742-5100 (301)405-6269 |
Sponsor Congressional District: |
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Primary Place of Performance: |
MD US 20742-5103 |
Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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Parent UEI: |
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NSF Program(s): |
RES EXP FOR TEACHERS(RET)-SITE, EWFD-Eng Workforce Development |
Primary Program Source: |
01002021DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001920DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
Program Reference Code(s): |
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Program Element Code(s): |
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Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.041 |
ABSTRACT
The College Board currently serves 7 million students, 23,000 high schools, and 3,600 colleges through the AP and SAT annually. However, no standardized educational program exists for pre-college students to earn widely accepted, transferable, engineering course credits. In addition, there are no nationally offered professional development programs to train and certify highly qualified, secondary teachers to support an undergraduate-level engineering course at the pre-college level. An Engineering for US All (E4USA), one-year high school course has the potential to 'democratize' the learning and practice of engineering by engaging high school students and their teachers to think and practice engineering principles and design practices, like an engineer. E4USA would be equivalent to placement credit for an introductory college course, such as: 1) core engineering; or 2) an elective; or 3) a substitute required course in the general education sequence. The impact might well go beyond an E4USA credit, through the credentialing of a broad range of STEM trained teachers to instruct and assess engineering principles and design-based experiences, and therefore become cornerstones supporting the introduction of engineering principles and design as outlined in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The E4USA framework will focus on three "big ideas:" 1) Engineering and Society; 2) Engineering Processes; and 3) Essential Engineering Content, Skills and Tools. Credit would be earned by students through two integrated pathways: 1) a standard's based curriculum covering the Principles of Engineering; and 2) a submission of a design project. The national pilot will be lead by the University of Maryland College Park and include Arizona State University, Morgan State University, Vanderbilt University, Virginia Tech, a dissemination collaboration with NASA, and a sampling of some 70 high schools across the United States.
Engineering for US All (E4USA) would help to 'demystify' and 'democratize' engineering, and empower science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers to gain the self-efficacy, self-confidence and skills to teach and assess their students engineering-based competencies. No standardized programs currently exist at a national level to train and certify high school teachers to support a one-year high school course based on engineering principles and a design-based experience. Our proposed national pilot would enable the standardized and centralization of data collection from across the United States, thus tracking STEM teachers and their students' trajectories of learning engineering concepts through competency-based evaluations and design project submissions. A national, data repository will be created and updated at the University of Maryland to track the training of the teachers, and their students. The research will explore if: 1) a broader diversity of students will consider engineering as an academic and career option; 2) professional development (PD) can enable teachers to apply engineering concepts across STEM disciplines to train students to tackle and solve problems; and 3) the piloting of the PD models can be used to certify highly qualified teachers. Projected outcomes will include: 1) a hybrid (e.g., in-person and online) PD model that prepares STEM teachers to gain the confidence, instructional skills and assessment competencies to support E4USA; 2) guidelines for the use of a Learning Management Systems and on-line analytical tools to collect data from a diverse sampling of teachers, students, institutions, and high schools; 3) E4USA course materials and resources; and 4) E4USA models that can be aligned to state and local high school graduation requirements.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Engineering for US All (e4usa) is a year-long hands-on introduction to engineering curriculum. The mission of e4usa is to demystify and democratize engineering by engaging high school students and educators in a project-based engineering curriculum. e4usa students develop an understanding of what engineering is and what engineers do, increasing their engineering literacy and growing their engineering identity. The content of e4usa is organized around four threads, each representing a critical element of engineering: Connect with Engineering, Engineering in Society, Engineering Professional Skills, and Engineering Design. Since 2019, the e4usa curriculum has been successfully deployed in over 75 high schools, by science, mathematics, engineering, and humanities educators, to over 4700 students, indicating that the e4usa curriculum is flexible and versatile enough to meet a variety of introductory engineering students' needs. The e4usa new teacher professional development has been endorsed by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) for meeting the Standards for Preparation and Professional Development of Teachers of Engineering.
Our pilot findings demonstrated that participation in e4usa increased high school students' engineering design self-efficacy. In addition, our findings highlighted the role of engineering identity above and beyond self-efficacy, outcome expectations, interest, and social support in the development of future commitment to engineering design. Our teacher research has found that e4usa is effective in training teachers without a science or engineering background to teach e4usa well. Additional research has demonstrated the validity and reliability of the Engineering Design Process Portfolio Scoring Rubric (EDPPSR) which serves as the foundation for the currently used MyDesign Scoring Rubric used to assess student engineering design process portfolios both formatively and summatively.
Colleges and universities around the US are partnering with e4usa in two prominent ways. They provide faculty and staff who serve as liaisons to individual high school teachers in their area. They are also awarding credit for prior learning in e4usa.
More information about e4usa's ongoing efforts is available at e4usa.org.
Last Modified: 01/27/2023
Modified by: Stacy S Klein-Gardner
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