Classroom learning and instruction in high school pre-college engineering settings: A video-based analysis

Abstract

We report on descriptive analyses of classroom observations of the instruction and classroom interactions that took place over four days of a high school pre-engineering class, Project Lead the Way, as participants engaged in project-based learning. Our objective was to study the enacted curriculum and determine how class time was apportioned, the extent to which time was distributed between developing technical skills and fostering conceptual understanding in engineering and mathematics, and the degree to which mathematics concepts were implicitly embedded within the engineering activities or made explicit for students, and therefore more supportive of transfer of learning. Our coding of the video data support the following three main descriptive results: (1) more of the instructor's time was spent on class management (non-instructional) tasks than on any other classroom activity, (2) a greater proportion of the total observed instruction time was devoted to skills rather than concepts, and (3) only a small fraction of instruction that linked math concepts to engineering coursework made those links explicit, while the large majority were implicitly embedded in the activities and the CAD software used in the class. Both positive and negative examples of explicit integration are provided to illustrate these events. We relate these results to prior research on the intended curriculum used to convey the idealized pre-engineering program, and discuss the implications these findings have for fostering deep learning of engineering concepts and supporting the transfer of knowledge to novel tasks and situations. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2009.