This exploratory project will expose leading K-12 students to the same educational materials and activities that have dramatically improved the retention of freshman in engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). This approach, which has yielded 98% retention rate in engineering freshman classes at USC, includes well-prepared lectures by well-known practicing engineers in various fields of engineering, such as the construction industry, and wireless telephones, as well as extra-curricular activities such as engineers without borders. All the existing materials and activities will be scaled up from about 400 engineering freshman to a larger number of K-12 students using the web resources of the Distance Educational Network of the Viterbi School of Engineering, the largest e-learning program in the Nation. The proposed research will build an infrastructure called the ?Inner City Civil and Environmental Engineering Academy? (ICCEEA), which combines five existing infrastructures to form an interdisciplinary engineering academy for urban middle and high school students and their teachers. The focus of the academy will be STEM secondary education and teacher professional development with an emphasis on increasing students? science literacy. In this exploratory phase, this research will be limited to a particular field of engineering, such as civil and environmental engineering, and to a few high-schools which have previously collaborated with the USC Rosier School of Education. The strengths and weaknesses of the proposed approach will be documented in detail so that they can be available to other engineering schools and high-schools.
The percentage of students studying engineering in the U.S. is far lower than many of our economic competitors, and increasing the visibility and attraction of engineering to high school students is vital to increasing participation in engineering. This research will utilize the educational materials and extra-curriculum activities that have proven successful in retaining freshman in engineering and the scalable power of well-established e-learning distribution systems to reach K-12 students. This will help build a large-scale web-pipeline from high schools to engineering schools, and contribute to rebuilding the size and leadership of the engineering workforce in California and the Nation.
