Using Engineering Principles of Design to Advance Teacher Education of Prospective Elementary Teachers

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There is a critical need to provide pre-service elementary school teachers with content-rich engineering design learning experiences in order to develop their knowledge, skills, and understandings for STEM teaching and student learning. In this research-based project, science, engineering, and education university faculty collaborate to create an innovative, scalable, and sustainable model for elementary science teacher preparation in order to address the unprecedented need to prepare elementary science teachers to teach engineering practices nationwide. By examining elementary pre-service teachers' learning of engineering practices, researchers can uncover the factors that contribute to the generation of high quality elementary STEM teachers as well as the challenges science and engineering faculty face when creating, implementing, and assessing cutting edge learning materials. This Using Principles of Design to Advance Teacher Education (UPDATE) project is a development, implementation and educational research project with the following goals, to: 1) refine, implement and assess the impact of an engineering design-based model for enhancing pre-service elementary science teachers' understanding of engineering practices; 2) research the impact of this approach on pre-service elementary science teachers' learning of engineering practices across multiple undergraduates science course; and 3) propagate and assess the model for transferability beyond Purdue University. Thus, this Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE-EHR) Development and Implementation II tier project, in the Engaged Student Learning track, will positively contribute to the goals of the IUSE-EHR program which seeks to identify best practices to improve K-12 STEM education through undergraduate pre-service STEM teacher preparation.The team will redesign an existing elementary science teacher preparation model consistent with the goals of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). UPDATE will work directly with 240 elementary pre-service teachers over five years to broaden the STEM learning landscape by purposefully integrating engineering design across five required undergraduate science courses and growing a new generation of high quality, exemplary elementary STEM educators. The project objectives are to: 1) refine innovative, content-rich, engineering design-based science tasks; 2) map the tasks to course objectives and related content; 3) implement the engineering design-based science tasks and pedagogies; 4) generate evidence-based outcomes for understanding how pre-service elementary teachers learn engineering practices and how to teach science using engineering practices; 5) utilize outcomes and faculty reflections to continually improve practice; and 6) validate a model for an integrated engineering design-based science approach to elementary science teacher preparation for transferability. During implementation of project UPDATE, the following research questions will be investigated: 1) How do pre-service teachers conceptualize engineering practices? 2) To what extent does pre-service teachers' knowledge of engineering practices change over time? 3) How do pre-service teachers perform on engineering design tasks within their respective undergraduate science courses? 4) In what ways does pre-service teachers' engagement in engineering design affect their science conceptual understandings relative to each task? 5) In what ways do pre-service teachers utilize their engineering design-based experiences from their undergraduate science courses to inform their lesson plans and implementation? and 6) What design-informed pedagogies do they employ in field experiences in the methods course? To measure learning of engineering practices and targeted science concepts, the research team will employ a mixed methods approach using inventories, concept assessments, interviews, and classroom observations. Anticipated project outcomes include a working, transferable, scalable model for elementary science teacher preparation that will include a collection of high quality, standards- and engineering design-based science tasks that emphasize the application of core disciplinary concepts; updated and enhanced undergraduate science courses that focus on learning science through design; enriched elementary science methods courses focused on the learning and teaching of science through engineering design; assessment tools that measure pre-service elementary teachers learning of engineering practices; and a portfolio of exemplars of student design artifacts, notebooks, and lesson plans. The model this project will develop and test, as well as the research findings that emanate from this project are likely to be very attractive and useful to other elementary teacher preparation programs across this nation that seek to incorporate engineering standards into their respective programs.