C

Investigators – Morgan Hynes, Chris Rogers, David Hammer, Merredith Portsmore, Elissa Milto, & Erin Riecker (Tufts University, CEEO)

Funding Source – This project is funded by the National Science Foundation DRK-12 program, grant # DRL-1020243. Any opinion, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Sample project using classroom materials

Research Overview – As the national push to increase STEM education in K-12 schools continues, one of the major hurdles has been preparing teachers to effectively cover these topics with their students. For that reason, this project addresses the third challenge put forth by the program solicitation: How can we enhance the ability of teachers to provide STEM education? Our aim is to ease teachers into engineering by providing a framework with which they are familiar. The Integrating Engineering and Literacy (IEL) project seeks to develop, design, and test a novel approach to introduce elementary students to engineering through reading and writing. The IEL project will engage elementary school (3-5) teachers in an innovative model of teacher professional development where teachers will develop the knowledge, skills, and abilities to introduce engineering to their students through their existing reading curriculum with IEL-designed engineering design challenges. We hypothesize that introducing engineering through literature, a familiar subject for teachers, will ease teachers into teaching engineering, likely new subject matter for them.

Goals – While we attempt to increase the STEM content students receive in elementary school, we recognize that teachers are faced with pressure to ensure students’ comprehension of traditional subjects. In elementary school in particular, a large focus is placed on literacy. We aim to bridge these two challenges – ensuring students’ literacy comprehension and increasing their STEM content – by proposing an interdisciplinary approach.

Research Questions

1. How do teachers’ engineering (and STEM) content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and perceptions or attitudes toward engineering influence their classroom teaching of engineering through literacy?   

2. Do teachers create their own personal conception of the engineering design process and what do these conceptions look like?

3. What engineering/reading thinking skills are students developing by participating in engineering activities integrated into their reading and writing work?

Methods Overview – The proposed project takes place at the design, develop, and test phase of the research development cycle. First, the IEL team will create a professional development curriculum for a cohort of elementary (grades 3-5) teachers. The IEL team will provide sample units and engineering instruction for these teachers. The units will be designed around addressing grade-appropriate literacy concepts while incorporating engineering design challenges. Each unit will be based on a grade-level appropriate reading comprehension topic, tied to both literacy and STEM standards, and example books that lend themselves to these activities and are appropriate for many students at the grade level. The teachers will then implement IEL units in their school the following year, using both sample units as well as ones they will create themselves. The students will identify needs of literary characters, create multiple possible solutions to the problems posed, and explore and refine those solutions through prototyping and revision. We want to enable teachers to use a variety of tools, from the inexpensive and easily accessible to the more technologically advanced.

Expected Outcomes - This research will uniquely contribute to the engineering educational field by integrating an engineering design methodology with existing children’s literature. The results of this study will inform educators, teacher educators, policy makers and administrators about the efficacy of an interdisciplinary approach to professional development and classroom interventions combining literature and engineering. Teachers will be able to implement engineering design challenges in the classroom by using literature as an entry point. Teachers will build students’ interest in math, science, engineering and literature through engaging interdisciplinary activities. The IEL team seeks to advance theory, design, and practice in the emerging field of elementary school engineering education, which will motivate and deepen the learning of science, math, engineering and reading and writing.