This project addresses four major challenges facing technician education: recruitment, under-prepared students, retention, and on-time degree completion. The primary goal of the project is to meet industry's current and future needs for engineering technicians by stepping up efforts to prepare high school students for college ET programs, reducing the number of credit hours required for associate degrees in ET, and specifically addressing the learning and financial needs of minority, female, and working students. Improved student learning of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is realized by (1) an expanded and continued use of an integrated, problem-based curricula developed by a previous ATE project, and (2) a new focus on relevant, smart, teaching that extends best practices to second-year ET students and reduces overall credit hours required for graduation. An image and marketing campaign is enhancing the status of ET careers and publicizing corporate sponsorship of ATE ET students. The project is also demonstrating academic value to the students and economic value to the employers of paid internships as early as the freshman and sophomore years. The outcomes of this project, supported by detailed evaluation research, are being widely disseminated through workshops, publications, presentations, and a web site in collaboration with the National Center for Engineering Technology Education.
