On the Benefits of Using the Engineering Design Process to Frame Project-based Outreach and to Recruit Secondary Students to STEM Majors and STEM Careers

The pedagogical premise of our outreach program is project-based learning. Although there is some variation in the literature as to what elements of an intervention are required in order for it to be considered “project-based learning,” there seem to be some essential components. Land and Zembal-Saul have described these (citing Blumenfeld et al.) as follows: 1) “use of long-term investigations that emphasize iterative and progressive deepening of understanding”; 2) “solution of a driving question that organizes and defines learning needs”; and 3) “production of a series of project artifacts [e.g., reports, presentations, posters] that represent understanding of the driving question.” In our High School Enterprise (HSE) program, teams of secondary students work on STEM projects that are authentic and long term, usually spanning multiple academic years. The projects vary from team to team insofar as what the students are actually working on because the students and their teacher-coach select the team’s project. A unifying and key focus of our program is that we actively and visibly (to secondary teachers and students) use the engineering design process to frame project work. This makes our program uniquely poised to address many of the issues and obstacles related to promoting STEM awareness and to achieving STEM engagement among secondary students. This paper outlines the aspects of engineering design and of our program implementation that address these issues and obstacles. We cite literature to support our views regarding the benefits of using the engineering design process and provide evidence of benefit from our program assessment. In making these aspects and benefits for secondary education evident, the authors hope to impart to post-secondary educators a broader perspective on the outcomes possible in teaching the process of engineering design. Introduction Over the past several years, there has been much concern regarding the global competitiveness of the United States. In 2005, the Gathering Storm Committee put forth several recommended actions to turn around the declining trends in US status, and it gave highest priority to “vastly improving K-12 science and mathematics education.” In their 2005 report, the Committee stated that inquiry-based learning (through summer internships and research opportunities) was one of two existing practices it found “attractive” for expansion. Five years later, in 2010, the same committee (minus three former members) issued a followup report. They unanimously agreed that the outlook for the United States had worsened and cited that K-12 public education had “shown little sign of improvement, particularly in mathematics and science.” These Academies’ reports and others convey an urgency to reform K-12 public education systems. But, changing the US K-12 public school systems (which number over 14,000) presents a great deal of time-consuming inertia to overcome for any change agent. Further, extensive nation-wide curriculum changes ought to be made carefully, with sufficient planning and financial support. In the meantime, as we await needed systemic changes, a broad outreach program such as High School Enterprise can have a much more timely impact. High School Enterprise (HSE) is an initiative that has established teams of secondary students that work on long-term STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) projects. The students are guided by STEM teacher-coaches who have been instructed in engineering design, STEM topics, project management, and teamwork. Our pilot study currently has 16 HSE teams that are spread among three states (Michigan, Illinois, and Georgia) and Puerto Rico in various types of secondary schools. A summary of information on the teams and their projects is provided in the Appendix (Table A1), and more information is available at the HSE website (www.highschoolenterprise.org). In a usual HSE implementation, a team of roughly 15 high school students, grades 9-12, is associated with a secondary school and partnered with a local university. The team works on a STEM project that is selected by the team and the coach (a STEM teacher at the high school), and that has local significance for the students and their community. The project continues from one academic year to the next, with most students continuing as well. In the course of their HSE experience, the students solve authentic STEM problems, perform testing and analyses, build prototypes, manufacture parts, stay within budgets, write business plans, and manage their own project. HSE teams also have program-facilitated access to expertise and mentoring from faculty and students in higher education and from professionals in industry. Figure 1 contains a model of the team support offered by the HSE program. Most HSE teams operate as afterschool activities, but we do have in-curricular implementations. When the coaching of an HSE team falls outside of the normal duties of a secondary teacher, the teacher-coach receives a stipend for his/her coaching efforts – just as an athletic coach would. Based on results from our pilot study, we expect that at the conclusion of their HSE experiences students will be prepared to undertake the education/training needed for STEM careers and will be more disposed to select those pathways. In short, the overarching goals of High School Enterprise are to motivate, prepare, and help students to pursue post-secondary STEM education and STEM careers. The pedagogical premise of High School Enterprise is project-based learning. Although there is some variation in the literature as to what elements of an intervention are required in order for it to be considered “project-based learning,” there seem to be some essential components. Land and Zembal-Saul have described these (citing Blumenfeld et al.) as follows: 1) “use of long-term investigations that emphasize iterative and progressive deepening of understanding”; 2) “solution of a driving question that organizes and defines learning needs”; and 3) “production of a series of project artifacts [e.g., reports, presentations, posters] that represent understanding of the driving question.” At the heart of project-based learning, of course, is the project. In High School Enterprise, the STEM projects that student teams work on are authentic and long term, usually spanning multiple academic years. The project work is framed with the cyclic engineering design process, which provides an iterative venue that facilitates a “progressive deepening of understanding” as students encounter failure and cycle back to prior design steps. The projects vary from team to team insofar as what the students are actually working on because the students and the teacher-coach select the team’s project (see Table A1). This aspect of project choice imparts ownership and the “driving question” that fuels project-based learning for each team. Each spring, the secondary HSE teams are brought to the campus of the partnering university to showcase their project work alongside university engineering students at an undergraduate expo event. The HSE teams create posters and presentations (i.e., artifacts) to highlight their project efforts of the academic year. These poster and presentation requirements also promote deeper learning by the formal reflective activities that they entail. They offer opportunities for both coaches and students to assess their progress in terms of the larger picture of a long-term project instead of just day to day gains. Figure 1. A model of support for the implementation of a High School Enterprise team that shows the student focus of the program and the surrounding support structure that comprises the partnering university, industry partners, and the local community of the host school. In working on a long-term High School Enterprise project, students are engaged in active, discovery-based STEM learning in a team-based social learning environment. According to educational research, this arrangement (i.e., project-based learning) should be effective at enabling students to learn, understand, and apply STEM content knowledge. 10-13 This, in turn, should help prepare them to be successful in pursuit of post-secondary STEM education. But there is more to what project-based learning offers than just cognitive gains – i.e., gains in knowledge of the STEM content areas that are associated with the projects. Metacognitive gains, too, are strongly associated with project-based learning. Metacognition, in simplified terms, generally refers to a person’s self-awareness of and selfregulation of his/her own cognition. And, in simplified terms, cognition can be thought of as the mental processes of knowing or understanding. Educational researchers have linked metacognition to deeper learning and, in particular, to problem solving skills. Further, metacognitive skills are associated with the self-regulation part of metacognition, that is, with the ability of the learner to “make adjustments in their own learning processes in response to their perception of feedback regarding their current status of learning.” Metacognitive skills have been described as “higher level thinking” and as the ability of a person to figure out “what to do when you don’t know what to do” (Wheatley, as cited by Cooper and SandiUrena) – i.e., the ability to problem solve. Effective metacognitive skills must be developed in order to enable self-directed learning. In this last point lies, we believe, the more critical college preparation (because it is a universal need) that High School Enterprise imparts: the enablement of self-directed learning through gains in metacognition, particularly gains in metacognitive skills. In High School Enterprise, these gains are achieved through projectbased learning that is structured and framed by the engineering design process – a key aspect of the HSE program. Benefits of using the Engineering Design Process A key aspect of High