Overview Of Engineering Education Assessment At Preschool 12 Th Grade Levels

In the era of No Child Left Behind and continuous well-funded efforts to increase the interest and readiness for engineering of P-12 and pre-college students, several initiatives have been launched. Among the current and most well known are the Infinity Project,; Project Lead the Way; the National Center for Technological Literacy; the National Center for Engineering and Technology Education; and the research-oriented Institute for P-12 Engineering Research and Learning (INSPIRE). Despite their relevance, rigorous empirical studies of these initiatives as well as other outreach efforts are reported scarcely in the literature. More specifically, within available reports, few have performed assessments and evaluations of their activities. This lack of evaluation and published resources hinders the progress of the national P-12 engineering education agenda, since it does not provide the necessary background elements to validate more generalized interventions. The purpose of this study is to present an overview of assessment components within established U.S. P-12 engineering education initiatives and outreach programs. This overview provides a foundational understanding of the state of these initiatives that in turn would serve as the basis of further inquiry and implementation. The resources of this review are initiatives’ websites, Engineering and Education databases, peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, and other search engines. In this overview, trends and patterns among activities and research have been identified and categorized in clusters. These clusters are presented and discussed under the light of the national engineering education agenda in an effort to influence new directions of practice and research within the P-12 engineering education community.