Engineering our world: A middle school teacher intervention

Abstract

The Engineering Our World project was funded by the National Science Foundation and was a collaborative effort among the Colorado School of Mines, the Denver Public Schools, the Cherry Creek Schools and the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. This pilot project provided intensive training and career development to middle school in-service science and mathematics teachers that focused on engineering and its relationship to science and mathematics curricula. A feature of this program was the inclusion of both a teacher summer workshop and monthly follow-up classroom visits. Three instruments were used to examine the effectiveness of the summer workshop for improving the participating teachers' knowledge of engineering. First, all of the participating teachers completed a background survey that described their college education with respect to science, mathematics and engineering. The second instrument was a pre-post content assessment that was developed by the project investigators in collaboration with the evaluator and that addressed the concepts presented during the workshop. The final assessment was a self-report instrument on the workshop activities. The results of this study suggest that not only did participating teachers' knowledge with respect to engineering improve as a result of the summer workshop, but also the teachers used their knowledge of engineering to supplement their science and mathematics classrooms.