This award provides funding for a 3 year continuing award to support a Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) in Engineering Site program at the University of Pittsburgh entitled, "Connecting Research and Teaching Through Product Realization: The Pittsburgh Quality of Life RET Site," under the direction of Dr. Michael Lovell.
This program is a renewal of a successful RET Site, which retains the best elements of the existing RET, integrates new elements of best practicces observed in other RET programs, and embraces a new Quality of Life (QoL) engineering research theme. A total of 33 high school science teachers (11 per year for three years) will be recruited from high needs urban high schools in the Pittsburgh area. They will spend 8 weeks in the summer working in engineering labs performing fundamental scientific research and then translate that research into innovative products, involving topics related to Quality of Life Technology. The major research thrust in the QoL theme will focus on innovations in computation, robotics, machine learning, communication, and miniaturization technologies that transform the lives of people with reduced functional capabilities. Other program activities will include redesigning design-based-learning (DBL) units that will be implemented in their classrooms, workshops and classroom visits by faculty mentors.
The site will directly impact 33 teachers and 4,500 students from high need urban high schools in the Pittsburgh region, with a particular focus on high schools comprised almost entirely of minority and low socio-economic status students. By focusing on QoL, the RET Site will improve awareness and develop technology for a growing segment of the population that is often overlooked--people with reduced functional capabilities due to aging or disability.
High school science teachers often act as the gateway to later careers, exposing students to possible pathways, but also providing feedback about what careers are not possible. Effective teaching skills and techniques are critical because teachers can turn off students as well as give the wrong message that students cannot succeed when in fact they could with alternative teaching approaches. In addition, high school science teachers have little knowledge of engineering, and thus provide little direction towards engineering even though far more people work as engineers than as scientists. This project sought to expose 40 high school science teachers to the practices of engineering (by having them work on engineering research projects) and provide them with teaching models the use an engineering design approach to teaching science in high school classrooms with over 1,000 students. This approach has been used successfully in the past, and this particular grant used Quality of Life Technologies as a thematic approach that is particularly appealing to a broad cross-section of students. Students resonated with that theme and were able to develop many creative engineering products from that theme such as a shaving crane assistive device, a robotic bed leverage system, and a thermobox to support independent living. Teachers were able to use engineering design to effectively teach concepts in chemistry, physics and biology. The grant also explored the use of summer camps as a venue for teachers to practice innovative teaching techniques in a less stressful content-driven environment. Teachers were able to not only explore new techniques, debug variations on the units they had created, but also observe and learn from each other. We found from survey data, after implementing our design-based units that teacher belief about their student's positively changed with respect to their students’ ability to do engineering design, motivation to learn science, and interests to pursue engineering following graduation. Our RET experience, for many crystallized in them a conviction about classroom learning: rather than classroom learning being about teachers giving information to students to memorize, classroom learning needs to be a combination of hands-on learning along with well specified content knowledge, allowing students to incorporate what they already know with their ability to brainstorm, diagram, challenge themselves, and design.
