Many of the biggest problems facing the United States and the world require engineering expertise to solve: climate change, feeding a growing population, energy independence, access to clean water, crumbling infrastructure, and others. And with global economic competitiveness inextricably linked to innovation, employers across a wide range of engineering and non-engineering fields such as health care, management, and marketing are seeking employees with engineering knowledge and related skills. These skills include the ability to creatively and systematically solve ill-defined problems
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Community for Advancing Discovery Research in Education (CADRE)
Bang, Warren, Rosebery, and Medin explore empirical work with students from non-dominant communities to support teaching science as a practice of inquiry and understanding, not as a “settled” set of ideas and skills to learn.
The adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards means that many educators who adhere to model-based reasoning styles of science will have to adapt their programs and curricula. In addition, all practitioners will have to teach modeling, and model-based reasoning is a useful way to do so. This brief offers perspectives drawn from Lehrer and Schauble, two early theorists in model-based reasoning.
This study sought to understand what motivates students at the high school and early college level to choose physics. It explored students’ expectations of their study of physics and their priorities for future careers. The researchers intended to contribute strategies to increase the number of females who complete university physics degrees. They also hoped to show that a wider range of perspectives needs to be represented among physics practitioners.
Where do kids’ beliefs about their ability to do science originate? How do these self-efficacy beliefs relate to unspoken theories about whether scientific ability is fixed or fluid? Researchers set out to answer these questions in a study of 1,225 middle and high school students.
This paper by Mujtaba and Reiss explores tendencies in girls’ and boys’ motivations, attitudes, and perceptions toward studying physics after age 16. Findings suggest that girls who want to continue studying physics understand the material and social benefits it affords. They are also more competitive than other students. However, in general, they have less confidence in their abilities than boys.
This Australian study by Logan and Skamp reports on students’ science interest across their first four years of secondary school. The findings will be relevant to all concerned about the decline in the numbers of students choosing to study science at higher levels and pursue science-related careers. Findings highlight the importance of an individual teacher’s pedagogical practices in either fostering or hindering student interest in science.
This paper examines how students, teachers, and parents evaluate residential fieldwork courses. As in prior research, findings from questionnaire data indicate that fieldwork effects social, affective, and behavioural learning. More surprisingly, focus group interviews captured increases in cognitive learning as well. This paper underscores the value of out-of-school experiences, particularly for students from under-resourced backgrounds.
The past 50 years have seen a change in how science is perceived, from an “unproblematic accumulation of facts that describe the world” to a much messier enterprise involving building and revising models and theories. In an effort to bring this new understanding to science teaching and learning, this foundational article presents a conceptual framework of how inquiry can be driven by cognitive tools that support disciplinary knowledge. The authors use rubrics to help students gain a deeper understanding of their work and of the inquiry process.
Students with special educational needs score significantly below their peers across several measures of science achievement. However, educational approaches that provide appropriate scaffolding and support, such as the inquiry-based science writing heuristic described in this paper, can benefit special educational needs students and ensure an equitable experience for all.
In this comparative case study, Enright explores whether the very act of labeling students contributes to continued differences in educational opportunity for students labeled “mainstream” and “non-mainstream.”
Dabney and colleagues examine the relationship between university students’ reported interest in STEM careers and their participation in out-of-school time science activities during middle and high school. The researchers examined the specific forms of OST science activities associated with STEM career interest and the correlations among those forms.