Dale R. Baker

Equity Issues in Science Education

The International Handbook of Science Education was commissioned by Kluwer Academic Publishers for their handbook series which was edited by Barry Fraser and Kenneth Tobin. These two editors invited me to take responsibility for editing one of the ten sections in the handbook. This was the section on equity. They also invited me to write the lead article for this section. As such, this article was not a study but a review of the literature in science education.

The Impact of Culture on Engineering and Engineering Education

The environment influences the activities undertaken by engineering educators, students, and practitioners within a given institution or company. Established environments evoke a culture and a set of norms that provide situated experiences. These culturally influenced experiences shape our understanding, identity, interest, and solutions to engineering problems. The environments and associated cultures that make up our society – home, community, school, and workplace – contribute to the perceptions we hold as members of that society. Western society has adopted a culturally influenced notion that engineering drives innovation and technology and fosters entrepreneurship through ABET-accredited programs that educate students in applied sciences, computing, engineering, and engineering technology. Consequently, this has led to the natural identity of engineering being a masculine field for those interested in technology, mathematics, and the hard sciences. Such an image of engineering neglects the idea of engineering supporting society and improving the lives of people all over the world. The following chapter selects some important cultural considerations to be discussed in detail to highlight the impact societal culture, engineering culture, and engineering education culture have on how engineering is perceived by society, taught by engineering educators, and practiced by engineers. This survey of cultural considerations on engineering and engineering education spotlights the importance of culture and the implications it has on learning, teaching, engineering practice, identity, and enculturation as an engineer. The chapter uses a variety of research studies utilizing numerous research methods to enlighten and inform various engineering stakeholders to prioritize cultural considerations when preparing engineering students for real-world activities and engineers for global problems.

Sex Differences in Classroom Interactions in Secondary Science

The inspiration for this study came from my experience working on a project with the Far West Laboratory in San Francisco. The project was called Portraits of Intermediate Life Science Classes (Lash et al., 1984) and was part of their Secondary Science and Mathematics Improvement Program. The goal of the project was to document how eleven 7th grade life science teachers in California and Utah taught science.

Tinkering and Technical Self-Efficacy of Engineering Students at the Community College

Self-efficacy in engineering is important because individuals with low self-efficacy have lower levels of achievement and persistence in engineering majors. To examine self-efficacy among community college engineering students, an instrument to specifically measure two important aspects of engineering, tinkering and technical self-efficacy, was given to 94 students. Items on the instrument measured students’ self-perception of abilities in engineering. These items were identified by members of the American Association of Engineering Education as critical to success in engineering. The items included such statements as “I can think outside the box” (Tinkering Scale), and “I can communicate ideas and concepts to others” (Technical Scale). Out of a possible 120 points, the mean score for the Technical Scale was 86.8 and 91.9 for the Tinkering Scale. Low self-efficacy was reported for items on the Tinkering Scale in trouble shooting and generating solutions to problems as well as understanding mechanisms and technical drawings. Low self-efficacy was reported for items on the Technical Scale in mathematical calculations, statistical modeling, and several areas of technical knowledge. On the Technical Scale, high self-efficacy was reported for items describing written and oral communication skills, logical and practical thinking, and tool use. High self-efficacy on the Tinkering Scale was reported for items describing persistence, curiosity about how things work, thinking outside the box and imagination, working well and building with hands, and a sense of how things work.

Using the Communication in Science Inquiry Project professional development model to facilitate learning middle school genetics concepts

This study describes the effect of embedding content in the Communication in Inquiry Science Project professional development model for science and language arts teachers. The model uses four components of successful professional development (content focus, active learning, extended duration, participation by teams of teachers from the same school or grade level) and instructional strategies for inquiry, academic language development, written and oral discourse, and learning principles as components of science activities. Teachers were given a pre/post‐institute genetics assessment. There was a statistically significant increase in scores for the entire sample and a statistically significant difference between science and language arts pre and post scores, with science teachers scoring higher in both cases.

Sex Differences in Formal Reasoning Ability

When I was in graduate school, teams of graduate students would conduct clinical interviews with elementary and secondary students to learn how to conduct the interviews and to help fellow students collect their data. This article comes out of that data gathering experience. Thus, the first submission of this article reflected a very traditional analysis of students by Piagetian levels and did not add much to the then current research.

Can the Differences between Male and Female Science Majors Account for the Low Number of Women at the Doctoral Level in Science

This article comes from my doctoral dissertation. I decided on this study after writing two other dissertation proposals that built on my interest in neurophysiology and my work identifying the aggression center in the brains of cats as well as my interest in studying why there were so few women in science. The first proposal I wrote is best forgotten.

Girls’ Summer Lab

Since I was not given permission by the publisher of the Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering (i.e. Begell House) to reprint Girls’ Summer Lab: An Intervention (Baker, Lindsey, & Blair, 1999) I will instead provide a synopsis of the study. Girls’ Summer Lab is an evaluation study of the impact of an intervention to support middle school minority girls’ in science.

A Mixed-Grade Engineering Course for High School Students: Student Interactions and Understanding of Engineering Design

Understanding of the engineering design process was examined for mixed grade (9-12) high school introductory engineering classes. The classes consisted of videos on engineering, guest speakers, internet research on engineering careers, and hands-on design projects. Student interactions were analyzed with classroom observations, video recordings, and interviews and showed there was a significant effect of maturity on learning. Change in understanding of the design process was measured by an open-ended pre and post class test with a 40 point scale rubric. It evaluated solution generation and selection, design reports, teamwork, project management, and ethics. A pre-post t-test indicated a significant increase in understanding (p < .00). Students in grade 10 had the largest gain of 6.82 points, grade 12 the smallest with 1.14 points while grades 9 and 11 had moderate gains of 4.2 and 4.3 points, respectively. The limited gains were due, at least in part, to enrollment and student interaction issues in the mixed-grade, large enrollment classes. Recommendations for positive change are discussed

Navigating rugged terrain: barriers and benefits to implementing an elective engineering design course in a high school setting

A team of engineering and education faculty and science education graduate students partnered with a local high school to implement an engineering design course. Course objectives included: learning to apply the engineering design methodology, acquiring and using basic engineering skills and tools, and understanding and valuing engineering as a career and a profession. The objectives were generally not achieved due to a variety of barriers related to the class. These included: varying maturity levels of students due to mixed age groups; lack of diversity; need for enhanced structuring of classes; inappropriate placement of students in engineering classes by guidance counselors; issues of materials management; inadequate application of science and math in design and problem solving; and the level of difficulty of course books. The nature of these barriers is discussed along with implications for teaching engineering design in high school. Recommendations for improvements to fulfil course objectives and achieve learning outcomes are presented