A study examining change in underrepresented student views of engineering as a result of working with engineers in the elementary classroom

Abstract

This paper describes the results of a National Science Foundation sponsored Graduate Teaching Fellows in K-12 Education project that was designed to increase elementary students' understanding of engineering, with an ultimate goal of increasing the probability of future involvement in engineering fields. This project, partnered graduate level engineering students called Engineering Fellows with grades 3, 4, and 5 urban classroom teachers. The Engineering Fellows worked for 20 hours a week over an entire academic year as a resource for the teachers, with 10 of those hours spent in various teaching roles. To capture student perceptions of engineers and engineering, a pre and post "Draw-an-Engineer" instrument was administered to one hundred and ninety project students. Pre and post interviews that focused on student drawings and student understanding of engineering were also completed with a subset of students. In this paper, project schools with a majority of underrepresented minority students are compared to project schools that did not contain a majority of underrepresented minority students. This comparison focuses on changes in student drawings and interview data over time amongst both groups. This comparison includes a discussion of both groups in terms of their developing understanding of engineering processes, engineering tools, and engineering fields represented by the generic term "engineering". Also included is a discussion of results in terms of implications for future policies and decision-making related to K-12 STEM education.