EAGER: New possibilities for broadening the impacts of middle school engineering through a partnership between teachers and underrepresented minority engineering college students

许多学校将工程设计任务纳入科学课程，为中学生提供机会，帮助他们找到解决现实问题的方法。然而，上高需求学校的学生往往很少有机会做出这样的贡献。这种情况之所以存在，是因为有时高需求学校的老师很难创造出让学生有足够信心参与工程设计过程的学习环境。这个探索性项目将通过观察中学教师与工科本科生配对是否能提高教师创造这种学习环境的能力来解决这个问题。它将使用协作孵化器模型来检查配对互动，并记录何时以及在何种条件下可能发生知识创造和转移。该研究将解决文献中的空白，其中很少有研究明确地从这个角度看待本科工程师的使用。它将开始发展一条途径，以更深入地了解如何提高教师的知识和技能，使他们能够自己实施这些类型的活动。案例研究设计将通过访谈、课堂观察、视频、音频记录和有声思考协议获取有关项目的信息。来自这些数据源的信息将促进对先前经验，个人信仰和促进高需求学校工程设计任务的方法的理解。不同的数据分析策略将被用来为教师和本科工程学生建立一个基线，通过配对的研究对象，最大限度地提高设计过程的潜在增长。具体来说，话语分析将用于编码实例，当对成员的隐性知识结合起来产生脚手架问题和方向，促进创造性的问题解决在设计过程的每个阶段。这一步骤还将用于证实口头资料分析，并选择突出教师与工科本科生之间合作的典型案例。随着时间的推移，它将进一步帮助跟踪结对中文化、语言和规范的变化。结果将包括关于是否有意义的知识和技能转移可能在教师-工程学生配对中以上下文丰富的方式发生，从而为课堂层面的变化提供信息。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Many schools include engineering design tasks in the science curriculum as one way to provide opportunities for middle school students to contribute to finding solutions to real-world problems. However, students who attend high needs schools often have few opportunities to make such contributions. This condition exists because sometimes teachers in high needs schools have difficulty creating learning environments where students feel confident enough to engage in the engineering design process. This exploratory project will address this issue by looking at whether pairing middle school teachers with undergraduate engineering students increases teachers' capacity to create this type of learning environment. It will use a collaborative incubator model to examine pair interactions and document when and under what conditions knowledge creation and transfer might take place. The study will address a gap in the literature where few studies have expressly looked at the use of undergraduate engineers from this viewpoint. It will initiate the development of a pathway towards a deeper understanding about how to improve teachers' knowledge and skills such that they can implement these types of activities on their own. A case study design will capture information about the project through interviews, classroom observations, videos, audio recordings, and think-aloud protocols. Information from these data sources will advance understanding regarding prior experiences, individual beliefs and approaches about facilitating engineering design tasks in high needs schools. Different strategies for analyzing data will be used to establish a baseline for teachers and undergraduate engineering students to maximize potential growth with respect to the design process through pairing of the study subjects. Specifically, discourse analysis will be used to code instances when tacit knowledge of pair members combines to produce scaffolding questions and directions that promote creative problem solving during each stage of the design process. This step will also be used to corroborate verbal profile analysis and select cases that highlight exemplary collaborations between teachers and undergraduate engineering students. It will further help track changes in culture, language, and norms within the pairing over time. Outcomes will include information about whether meaningful transfer of knowledge and skills might occur within teacher-engineering student pairing in contextually rich ways that inform change at the classroom level.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.