The College Board currently serves 7 million students, 23,000 high schools, and 3,600 colleges through the AP and SAT annually. However, no standardized educational program exists for pre-college students to earn widely accepted, transferable, engineering course credits. In addition, there are no nationally offered professional development programs to train and certify highly qualified, secondary teachers to support an undergraduate-level engineering course at the pre-college level. An Engineering for US All (E4USA), one-year high school course has the potential to 'democratize' the learning and practice of engineering by engaging high school students and their teachers to think and practice engineering principles and design practices, like an engineer. E4USA would be equivalent to placement credit for an introductory college course, such as: 1) core engineering; or 2) an elective; or 3) a substitute required course in the general education sequence. The impact might well go beyond an E4USA credit, through the credentialing of a broad range of STEM trained teachers to instruct and assess engineering principles and design-based experiences, and therefore become cornerstones supporting the introduction of engineering principles and design as outlined in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The E4USA framework will focus on three "big ideas:" 1) Engineering and Society; 2) Engineering Processes; and 3) Essential Engineering Content, Skills and Tools. Credit would be earned by students through two integrated pathways: 1) a standard's based curriculum covering the Principles of Engineering; and 2) a submission of a design project. The national pilot will be lead by the University of Maryland College Park and include Arizona State University, Morgan State University, Vanderbilt University, Virginia Tech, a dissemination collaboration with NASA, and a sampling of some 70 high schools across the United States.
Engineering for US All (E4USA) would help to 'demystify' and 'democratize' engineering, and empower science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers to gain the self-efficacy, self-confidence and skills to teach and assess their students engineering-based competencies. No standardized programs currently exist at a national level to train and certify high school teachers to support a one-year high school course based on engineering principles and a design-based experience. Our proposed national pilot would enable the standardized and centralization of data collection from across the United States, thus tracking STEM teachers and their students' trajectories of learning engineering concepts through competency-based evaluations and design project submissions. A national, data repository will be created and updated at the University of Maryland to track the training of the teachers, and their students. The research will explore if: 1) a broader diversity of students will consider engineering as an academic and career option; 2) professional development (PD) can enable teachers to apply engineering concepts across STEM disciplines to train students to tackle and solve problems; and 3) the piloting of the PD models can be used to certify highly qualified teachers. Projected outcomes will include: 1) a hybrid (e.g., in-person and online) PD model that prepares STEM teachers to gain the confidence, instructional skills and assessment competencies to support E4USA; 2) guidelines for the use of a Learning Management Systems and on-line analytical tools to collect data from a diverse sampling of teachers, students, institutions, and high schools; 3) E4USA course materials and resources; and 4) E4USA models that can be aligned to state and local high school graduation requirements.
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.
