Toward A Technologically Literate Society: Elementary School Teachers’ Views Of The Nature Of Engineering

Generating a technologically literate society is considered to be one of the main goals of primary and secondary education. At the heart of technological literacy would be a knowledge of the nature of engineering (NOE) upon which content knowledge in engineering/technology could be built. Technological literacy of this nature cannot be developed among elementary school students, however, without dedicated and well-informed teachers. That raises the question: What should teachers know to promote technological literacy and spread it in their students’ hearts and minds? We believe that an appropriate view of the NOE can play a role in the development of engineering and technology literacy that is similar to the role that an appropriate view of the nature of science (NOS) plays in the development of scientific literacy. We therefore studied elementary-school teachers’ views of the NOE to obtain information that could guide both researchers and curriculum developers understand the current status of elementary-school education. A naturalistic research approach was applied to design of this study. Data were collected by employing individual interviews with ten K-5 teachers. Content analysis was applied to the interview data to find general themes and patterns in teachers’ views of the NOE. Results showed that teachers have positive attitudes towards engineering, but their knowledge of NOE is mostly limited to what they have experienced through popular culture. We noted that teachers’ views of the NOE were influenced by personal relationships they might have with engineers who were close relatives or friends. Another pattern that was found in teachers’ views of the NOE involved their perception that engineering is a problem-solving activity, or involved problem solving within the process of inventing or creating innovative products. Although the teachers believed that engineers need to function in a holistic fashion, taking social and economical factors into account in their work, their perceptions of engineering were not sufficiently rich to allow them to explain how social and cultural factors affect engineering. The results of this study of teachers’ views of the NOE provide insight into the way professional development programs for elementary-school teachers should be designed to help these teachers bring engineering into the elementary-school classroom. Background and research questions The literature on the nature of science (NOS) has suggested that students, teachers, and the vast majority of society, in general, believe certain common myths about science, including the myths that scientific facts are absolute and purely objective, that there is no role for human interpretation or imagination in science, and that scientists have certain rigid methods to generate scientific knowledge and/or solve problems. 1-5 Driver and her colleagues 6 have shown that students form ideas about science, its process, and its product — scientific knowledge — before any formal science instruction. The students’ ideas are not nearly as sophisticated as those held by scientists and/or philosophers of science, but even elementary school students have ideas about how scientists work. It has been suggested that these ideas come from the students’ exposure to the image of science and scientists from a variety of sources, including films, television programs, and from their parents and relatives. 7 P ge 14273.2 Research on students’ misconceptions of science has suggested that teachers are a source of students’ alternative frameworks. 8-12 The alternative frameworks held by the teachers can play a particularly important role in students’ learning because formal instruction may either generate new alternative frameworks for the students or support the old ones. As a result, attempts to change students’ conceptions of a particular phenomenon using conceptual change strategies may not be as fruitful as we would either hope or expect because, in the end, teachers deliver the instruction we design. 10 Teachers who have naïve or alternative frameworks or conceptions of a subject may not teach them well or they may produce ill-structured schema in students’ minds. Unlike the well-established field of the philosophy of science, no equivalent study of the philosophy of engineering exists. 13 However, inasmuch as engineering and engineering artifacts are part of our everyday life, elementary school students and their teachers have some elements of a developing epistemology of engineering and engineering thinking which may not be the desired one. 14-16 It has historically been difficult for many people to separate achievements in science from those in engineering. When the Apollo 11 put Neil Armstrong on the surface of the moon, for instance, many people called it a victory of science. When a new type of material, such as lightweight, super-strong composites emerges on the market, newspapers and other media often report it as a scientific discovery. Genetic engineering of crops to resist insects is also usually attributed wholly to science. However, even though science is strongly tied with all of these advances, they are actually examples of technology that requires the application of unique skills, knowledge, and techniques. 17 Thus, there is reason to believe that teachers are likely to confuse science and engineering, 15 especially inasmuch as there is no direct exposure to engineering in pre-service teacher training programs.