Monica E. Cardella

Elementary Teachers’ Views about Teaching Design, Engineering, and Technology

While there is a growing interest in infusing engineering into elementary classrooms, very little is known about how well positioned elementary teachers are to teach engineering. This study examined elementary teachers’ perceptions of and familiarity with design, engineering, and technology (DET). We collected data from 192 elementary teachers using the DET teacher survey. While these elementary teachers thought teaching DET was important (Mean 5 3.46; SD 5 0.43), they were relatively unfamiliar with DET (Mean 5 2.01; SD 5 0.65). Years of teaching experience did not affect teachers’ familiarity with teaching DET and their perceptions of how importance DET was. Moderately experienced teachers showed stereotypical views of engineering. Furthermore, teachers’ motivations to teach DET differed based on their ethnic backgrounds. The results suggest a need to improve elementary teachers’ familiarity with design, engineering, and technology. Professional development activities should be guided by research on teacher knowledge, and establish an alignment between motivations of teachers and expectations of their schools to ensure administrative support.

Cambridge Handbook of Engineering Education Research: Engineering Design Education

Introduction Designing is a key component of professional practice in many fields of human endeavor (e.g., architecture, engineering, industrial design, art, and literature). For engineers, designing integrates engineering knowledge, skill, and vision in the pursuit of innovations to solve problems and enable modern life. With this understanding, engineering educators have, for several decades, been infusing their programs with design curricula and pedagogical experiences in order to enhance the design competencies of engineering graduates. Paralleling the development of these curricula and experiences, a growing body of research has been providing a scholarly basis for engineering design education. The goal of this chapter is to acquaint readers with engineering design education research and practice. To situate engineering design education in the larger context, we first present a brief history of research on design processes across several fields and then move to a more specific description of research on engineering design processes. We then focus on research that investigates effective ways to teach and assess the design process and review curricular structures and pedagogies that are commonly used in undergraduate engineering programs.

Catalyzing research-to-practice conversations: A global, interdisciplinary and emergent symposium in the context of learning to design

This paper describes the design of an international symposium whereby design researchers and design educators from diverse disciplines form a learning partnership to advance design thinking. Concepts from three theoretical frameworks, the scholarship of integration, learning partnerships and complexity theory, were used to design interactions before, during, and after the symposium. This transformative approach provides a potentially more effective means than the traditional diffusion model (research-disseminate-adopt) to translate educational research into teaching practice.