Incorporating Engineering Design into High School STEM Initiatives

A report by the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine titled “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” specifically calls for the development of rigorous new K-12 curriculum materials to improve science and mathematics education as a highest priority action. With funding from the National Science Foundation, we have developed new curriculum modules which target the International Technology & Engineering Educators Association (ITEEA) Standards for Technological Literacy and increase involvement in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) related fields. Each module focuses on an engineering design challenge that provides real world context, is grounded in STEM content, and uses the engineering design process to design, construct and test a working prototype. The modules feature professionally produced video segments which introduce the design challenge, hands-on activities, and online segments with interactive animations and mathematical simulations. The curriculum has successfully been used in high school technology education classes over the last six years. Our state recently received an award from the Race To the Top (RTTT) fund, a competitive grant program designed to encourage and reward states that are creating the conditions for education innovation and reform and achieving significant improvement in student outcomes, including making substantial gains in student achievement, closing achievement gaps, improving high school graduation rates, and ensuring student preparation for success in college and careers. Our state has focused its RTTT program to include STEM initiatives throughout PreK-12 to teachers looking for new curricula with a STEM focus, which in turn has fostered collaborations among STEM high school teachers. As a result, a higher percent of science teachers attended our Professional Development (PD) workshop last summer and are currently using our engineering design curricula in their traditional science classrooms. Further, one of the technology education teachers using our curriculum has partnered with physics and biology teachers to provide supplemental science lessons related to the overarching engineering design challenge. In another school, three teachers who attended the PD workshop are partnering with two teachers who did not attend the workshop to help them deliver the curriculum to their students, which has resulted in thirteen classrooms from a single high school using the same curriculum module. Currently thirty-five classrooms at eleven different schools are using the "Engineering in Health Care: A Heart Lung Case Study" curriculum module, and more classrooms are planning to use this module in the winter or spring of 2012. Student learning data is being collected and analyzed to determine the effectiveness of using the curriculum in a variety of different settings and will be compared to the results attained in previous years of the program.