This project will develop standardized, exportable and comparable assessment instruments and models for Women In Engineering (WIE) programs nationwide, thus allowing them to assess their program's activities and ultimately provide data for making well-informed evaluations.
To accomplish this goal, the principal investigators at the University of Missouri and Penn State University will work over a three-year period with their institutions' WIE programs and three cooperating programs at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Georgia Tech, and University of Texas at Austin. With these five programs that collectively represent a variety of private and public, years of experience for WIE directors and student body characteristics, the investigators will pilot, revise, implement, conduct preliminary data analysis and disseminate easy-to-access, reliable and valid assessment instruments. The principles of formative evaluation will be applied to all instruments and products. All institutions will use the same set of instruments, thus allowing them to have access to powerful benchmarking data in addition to the data from each of their respective institutions.
A prior project, the Women's Experience in College Engineering Project (WECE) sought to characterize the factors that influence women students' experiences and decisions by studying college environments, events and support programs that affect women's satisfaction with their engineering major, and their decisions to persist or leave these majors. In contrast to WECE's macro-level and student focus, this proposal's target audience is WIE directors, with a focus on WIE programs, not students.
Women in Engineering programs around the United States are a crucial part of our country's response to the need for more women in engineering professions. There are about 50 WIE programs nationwide. Half have expressed interest in this effort. WIE directors will benefit by having ready-made assessment tools that will allow them to collect data on programs, evaluate these programs, and make decisions on how to revise programs and / or redistribute limited resources to maximize overall program effectiveness. Data from these instruments will also provide substantiated evidence for administrators, advisory boards and potential funding agencies. Finally, because these instruments will be available nationwide, programs will have the opportunity to take advantage of powerful benchmarking data for their decision-making processes.
This project provides the next logical step in the national movement to recruit and retain women in engineering.
I have been involved in College education since my days as a student in the Universidad de Buenos Aires. At that time, 1960, I helped to teach the course of Scientific Russian given in the Faculty of Sciences; strange as it might seem, the aim of the course was to allow the students to use scientific books especially in the area of Physics and Mathematics.
The Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network (NISE Network) is a national infrastructure that links science museums and other informal science education organizations with nanoscale science and engineering research organizations. The Network’s overall goal is to foster public awareness, engagement, and understanding of nanoscale science, engineering, and technology. As part of the front-end effort, this report, Part IIB, documents 19 nanoscale STEM programming, media, and school-based projects that have been completed or are in development as of 2005.
This survey was designed to assess preservice teachers' perceptions of how their mentoring in science teaching has influenced their ability to teach science. The tool measures personal attributes, system requirements, pedagogical knowledge, modeling, and feedback as factors that comprise beneficial mentoring for science teachers.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Peter HudsonKeith SkampLyndon Brooks
The authors explored the perceived effects of an environmental expressive writing exercise by using a modified phenomenological method. The authors asked preservice teachers enrolled in a required public university science and society education course to compose multigenre compositions describing personal environmental impacts, followed by written reactions to the assignment. A group of 5 students from the course participated in interviews in which the authors investigated their backgrounds, attitudes, and experiences related to the expressive writing project. Analysis of the participants'
This study focused on informal reasoning regarding socioscientific issues. It sought to explore how content knowledge influenced the negotiation and resolution of contentious and complex scenarios based on genetic engineering. Two hundred and sixty-nine students drawn from undergraduate natural science and nonnatural science courses completed a quantitative test of genetics concepts. Two subsets (n = 15 for each group) of the original sample representing divergent levels of content knowledge participated in individual interviews, during which they articulated positions, rationales
This paper discusses three case studies – an exhibition on biodiversity, a hotel water conservation program, and a partnership between a nature center and urban public schools – to establish parameters for designing learning experiences that accommodate the varied worldviews and attitudes of learners. Positive outcomes occurred in all three cases, but could best be interpreted if sub-samples of participants were distinguished based on their readiness to embrace conservation messages. The studies demonstrated the limitations of narrowly defined learning outcomes as benchmarks for success or
This paper focuses on an early stage of developing curricular materials to support students' learning of scientific inquiry. The materials being developed and tested, called Classroom FeederWatch (CFW), aimed to support science inquiry and were developed by a collaborative team of private curriculum developers and scientists (ornithologists). Inquiry dimensions were influenced at the outset by the newly released National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1996) and by prior successful experiences of ornithologists with inquiry
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Deborah TrumbullRick BonneyNancy Grudens-Schuck
Museums are favorite and respected resources for learning worldwide. In Israel, there are two relatively large science centers and a number of small natural history museums that are visited by thousands of students. Unlike other countries, studying museum visits in Israel only emerges in the last few years. The study focused on the roles and perceptions of teachers, who visited four natural history museums with their classes. The study followed previous studies that aimed at understanding the role teachers play in class visits to museums (Griffin & Symington, 1997, Science Education, 81, 763
The authors of this article discuss three pedagogical approaches, learning community, community of practice and community learning, and analyse their significance for knowledge acquisition and construction in higher education. The authors also explore the roles of technology in creating adequate environments for educators to implement teaching practices supported by these approaches and explain, through an illustrative course example, how technology and teaching methods can be used together to promote interaction among learners and help them achieve course goals.
Research indicates that young children, unlike adults, have a generalized tendency to view not only artifacts but also living and nonliving natural phenomena as existing for a purpose. To further understand this tendency's origin, the authors explored parents' propensity to invoke teleological explanation during explanatory conversations with their children. Over 2 weeks, Mexican-descent mothers were interviewed about question-answer exchanges with their preschool children. Analyses revealed that children asked more about biological and social phenomena than about artifacts or nonliving
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Deborah KelemenKrista CaslerMaureen CallananDeanne Perez-Granados
This longitudinal research used a sociocultural perspective to examine planning competence in the everyday experiences of European American and Latino children from 7 to 9 years of age. Data on children's participation in planning their activities outside of school, parental expectations about children's planning competence, and children's planning in the classroom were collected yearly from Grades 2 to 4 from 140 children and their mothers, and the children's teachers. Results indicate that decision-making practices and parental expectations change with development and vary by ethnicity