This award provides funding for a 3 year standard award to support a Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) in Engineering Site program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), entitled, "RET Site: Inquiry-based Bioengineering Research and Design Experiences for Middle-School Teachers," under the direction of Dr. Terri A. Camesano. For this program, WPI will recruit 21 middle-school science teachers (7 per summer) primarily from Worcester Public Schools to participate in a 6-week long intensive summer research experience in the Life Sciences and Bioengineering Center at Gateway Park, a newly constructed facility that houses all of WPI's research facilities in bioengineering. Teachers will work alongside faculty and graduate students, participating in high-level research projects in fields such as tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, and infection control on biomaterials. The long-term goals of WPI's RET in Engineering Site program are to motivate and improve middle school student-learning in engineering and establish a collaborative partnership between the Worcester middle-school teachers and WPI engineering faculty through inquiry-based experiences in bioengineering.
During the three years of the project, twenty-one middle school science and technology teachers, primarily from Worcester Public Schools, participated in a 6-week long intensive summer research experience in the Life Sciences and Bioengineering Center at Gateway Park, a newly constructed facility dedicated to research in bioengineering. Teachers worked alongside faculty and graduate students, participating in high-level research projects in fields such as tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, and infection control on biomaterials. In addition, the teachers attended Biomedical Engineering Seminars and "Cool Science" talks that covered a broad range of topics. The primary activities in which teachers engaged were inquiry-based research and curriculum development. Teachers spent time reading literature, designing an experiment, executing the experiment, analyzing the data and repeating the cycle until the desired objective was met. Although an initial research objective was provided by a WPI professor, the teachers had the freedom to choose how to meet the objective. The institution provided resources to conduct the experiments that the teachers designed. Faculty research mentors and graduate research assistants offered guidance, collaboration, and support. In addition to research, teachers also developed curriculum units or lessons incorporating inquiry-based engineering into their classrooms. To create a curriculum unit, teachers followed the engineering design process. During weekly meetings, teachers presented their work on their lesson plans and received feedback from and provided suggestions to other group members. Teachers formally presented their research projects and curriculum units at the end of the program. Four teachers presented their research at national engineering education conferences. All teachers shared their experiences with peers in their school districts. During the academic year following the RET summer experience, teachers implemented their curricular units in their classrooms. At follow-up meetings, teachers reported on their dissemination successes and issues. One teacher reported that along with teaching the unit to his class, he will "train the principal to teach 2 sessions during the year and 1 other teacher to teach 3 sessions next year." While blog entries designed for sharing experiences were required in the first year, they were dropped in the remaining years because teachers found face-to-face conversations more effective. The RET website remained as a useful tool for sharing links for research materials and classroom activities and resources and for posting RET program materials. As a result of their participation in the RET program, teachers reported increases in their understanding of biomedical engineering and recent developments in the field. Teachers expressed increased ability to convey excitement about bioengineering to their students, explaining the details of bioengineering project, and implementing the engineering design process. They developed a collaborative relationship with their faculty research mentors, research partner, and other RET teachers. The content of their courses and the way they teach were positively affected by the RET program. For example, teachers stated that they incorporated the inquiry process they learned over the summer into all their teaching. The multi-layered opportunities of knowledge attainment, practical research experience, curriculum development, and presentation advanced teachers’ understanding of and discovery in bioengineering while promoting teaching, training, and learning. An original concept of the project was the requirement that teachers develop their curriculum units following the engineering design process.