Teaching K 12 Engineering Using Inquiry Based Instruction

Since 1999, the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University has placed 95 undergraduate and 33 graduate Engineering Teaching Fellows in 14 elementary schools and five middle schools in four counties in North Carolina serving 6,500 students. These Fellows assist partnership teachers with the creation and delivery of lessons and activities that integrate meaningful math, science and engineering exercises into all areas of the Standard Course of Study. Based on outcome assessments of training needs for these Teaching Fellows and recommendations from the National Science Education Standards on best practices for teaching K-12 science, the Pratt School of Engineering created the MUSIC Program (Math Understanding through Science Integrated with Curriculum). MUSIC is a GK-12 track 2 program funded by the National Science Foundation. The MUSIC Engineering Teaching Fellows receive intensive and paired teacher/fellow training in inquiry-based instruction. The Pratt School of Engineering, partnered with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, the North Carolina Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education Center, GlaxoSmithKline, Progress Energy and nine North Carolina school systems, has also developed a K-8 teacher training initiative known as TASC: Teachers and Scientists Collaborating. TASC will train 7,560 teachers by 2007. Beginning in the fall of 2004, TASC trainers began providing the more intensive, ongoing training for Duke Engineering Teaching Fellows in inquiry-based instruction. This paper describes the evolution of changes made in the Duke Engineering Teaching Fellows (ETFs) training program based on formative and summative evaluation of the last five years of the Duke ETF program, provides a brief definition of inquiry, an overview of outcomes studies of inquirybased instruction applied to teaching K-12 science and engineering concepts, and describes formative outcomes of our new inquiry-based training program