Preparing Prospective STEM Teachers to be Effective in Teaching Engineering Concepts & Design in Middle and High Schools

The project aims to serve the national need to prepare high quality engineering teachers for the secondary classroom. Increasing retention and graduation rates in undergraduate engineering degree programs continues to be an issue. Researchers have identified several factors contributing to this issue.

These include: i) the traditional teaching of concepts in mathematics, physics, engineering, and technology is isolated with students often not seeing the relationship between what is being taught and the world around them or their own interests, and ii) few teachers in K-12 education are prepared to teach engineering concepts. The objective of this project is to prepare engineering and engineering technology undergraduates to become effective educators who are adept at developing hands-on engineering activities for grade 6-12.

The focus will be on developing strong technical skills combined with training in pedagogy, intensive classroom field experiences, clinical practice, and mentoring. Having trained engineers as practicing teachers in the secondary level classroom could potentially mitigate the high drop-out rate in engineering programs at the undergraduate level.

Texas Experiment Station and Texas A&M University will partner with two rural school districts, Caldwell and Hearne Independent School Districts. Project goals include training prospective STEM teachers for the technologically advanced, multicultural, and diverse 21st-century classroom. The project intends to provide scholarships, over five years, for 20 prospective STEM teachers who are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in engineering, engineering technology, science or mathematics with secondary school teaching certification.

The formation of both engineering and teaching identities and their impact on retention and persistence of prospective STEM teachers will be explored. Within the context of Identity Development Theory, researchers will investigate the extent to which co-curricular support that explicitly targets self-efficacy, such as engineering design projects and field experiences, influences the development of engineering and teaching identities in prospective STEM teachers.

The intended goal is to develop prospective teachers who are multiculturally aware, pedagogically trained, and qualified STEM professionals with a strong emphasis on hands-on learning. As practicing teachers, they will be ideally suited to teach students representing the full spectrum of diverse talent for the next generation of the STEM workforce. This will create the potential for increasing the numbers of dynamic and innovative employees in STEM fields, allowing the United States to maintain the edge in technological and engineering advancements.

The results of the project will be disseminated through the project's website, engineering duration conferences and journal articles. This Track 1: Scholarships and Stipends project is supported through the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program (NOYCE). The Noyce program supports talented STEM undergraduate majors and professionals to become effective K-12 STEM teachers and experienced, exemplary K-12 teachers to become STEM master teachers in high-need school districts.

It also supports research on the effectiveness and retention of K-12 STEM teachers in high-need school districts.

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.