A study of secondary teachers' perceptions of engineers and conceptions of engineering

Abstract

People's personal beliefs and perceptions can be explored and interpreted by investigating the mental images that they draw with regards to a specific subject. With this in mind, many researchers utilize the Draw-An-Engineer Test (DAET) instrument to evaluate students' and teachers' perceptions of engineers and engineering through drawings. Previous research shows that teachers' perceptions and attitudes toward engineers and engineering can play a substantial role in affecting perceptions and stereotypes of students related to engineering. Because the teachers' perceptions are correlated with their students' perceptions, understanding and improving how teachers perceive the concepts of engineers and engineering can be used to enhance students' perceptions toward the same concepts and improve the number of students who choose Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields as their future careers. In this study, twenty-four STEM teachers participated in a two-week-long engineering-focused professional development (PD) program in 2017 and 2018. The STEM teachers learned about innovative engineering technologies and designing appropriate lesson plans to incorporate the newly learned content into their curricula. The purpose of this study was twofold. First, the authors aimed to understand the characteristics of the mental images teachers had regarding engineers and engineering. Second, the authors focused on understanding how participant teachers' perceptions changed regarding engineers and engineering after the two-week-long PD ended. The participating teachers in the study were administrated the DAET followed by a survey including 5 open-ended questions. Teachers drew an engineer and then answered the open-ended questions in two occasions; once before the PD activities and once after the PD activities. The pre- and post- drawings were evaluated using the DAET rubric and analyzed using the descriptive and inferential statistics, the pre-post open-ended question responses were analyzed by using the constant comparative method. Findings from the qualitative and quantitative data analyses are reported.