Pre-university Engineering Education

262 Pages·2016·13.017 MB·English

by  Marc J. de Vries, Lena Gumaelius, Inga-Britt Skogh (eds.)

Pre-university Engineering Education
INTERNATIONAL TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION STUDIES
Volume 14
Series Editors
Rod Custer, Illinois State University, USA
Marc J. de Vries, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Editorial Board
Piet Ankiewicz, University of Johannesburg, South Africa
John R. Dakers, University of Glasgow, UK
Dov Kipperman, ORT Israel, Israel
Steven Lee, Taiwan National Normal University Taipei, Taiwan
Gene Martin, Technical Foundation of America, USA
Howard Middleton, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia
Chitra Natarajan, Homi Babha Centre for Science Education, Mumbai, India
Scope
Technology Education has gone through a lot of changes in the past decades. It
has developed from a craft oriented school subject to a learning area in which the
meaning of technology as an important part of our contemporary culture is explored,
both by the learning of theoretical concepts and through practical activities.
This development has been accompanied by educational research. The output of
research studies is published mostly as articles in scholarly Technology Education
and Science Education journals. There is a need, however, for more than that. The
field still lacks an international book series that is entirely dedicated to Technology
Education. The International Technology Education Studies aim at providing the
opportunity to publish more extensive texts than in journal articles, or to publish
coherent collections of articles/chapters that focus on a certain theme. In this book
series monographs and edited volumes will be published. The books will be peer
reviewed in order to assure the quality of the texts.
Pre-university Engineering Education
Edited by
Marc J. de Vries
Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands and
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Lena Gumaelius
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
and
Inga-Britt Skogh
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 978-94-6300-619-4 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-94-6300-620-0 (hardback)
ISBN: 978-94-6300-621-7 (e-book)
Published by: Sense Publishers,
P.O. Box 21858,
3001 AW Rotterdam,
The Netherlands
https://www.sensepublishers.com/
All chapters in this book have undergone peer review
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved © 2016 Sense Publishers
No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming,
recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the
exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and
executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface vii
1. Pre-university Engineering Education: An Introduction 1
Marc J. de Vries, Lena Gumaelius and Inga-Britt Skogh
2. A Philosophical Basis for Pre-university Engineering Education 13
Marc J. de Vries
3. The Nature of Pre-university Engineering Education 27
Per Norström
4. Pre-university Engineering Education in Germany: Needs, Possibilities
and Limits – A Description 47
Gabriele Graube and Ingelore Mammes
5. Characteristics of Pre-college Engineering Education in the United States 65
Greg Pearson
6. Engineering Education for Elementary Students 81
Christine M. Cunningham
7. Pre-university Engineering Education in New South Wales 101
Peter Thompson
8. “Are They Ready?”: The Technical High School as a Preparation for
Engineering Studies 121
Lars Bo Henriksen
9. PBL in the School System 141
Anette Kolmos
10. Access, Inclusion, and Heterogeneity in Pre-university Engineering
Education 155
Andrea K. Agree, Anna E. Faloon and Johannes Strobel
11. Industry’s Role in Pre-university Engineering Education: The UK
Experience 179
David Barlex
12. Engineering Professional Societies and Pre-university Engineering
Education 205
Elizabeth Parry, Pamela Lottero-Perdue and Stacy Klein-Gardner
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
13. The Role of Engineers in Pre-university Education: Success-Factors
and Challenges 221
Anne-Lotte Masson, Tanja Klop, Patricia Osseweijer and
Marc J. de Vries
14. Pre-university Engineering Education Research at a University of
Technology: A Case Study of the Pre-university Engineering
Initiatives at KTH 237
Lena Gumaelius and Inga-Britt Skogh
vi
PREFACE
Pre-university engineering education has become the topic of increasing interest in
technology education circles. It can provide content for the E in STEM (Science,
Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education, which is in the interest of
technology educators at different educational levels as it builds the bridge between
them and the science and mathematics educators. Given this growing interest it is
not surprising that there is a need for publications that show how pre-university
engineering education could be conceptually founded and practically given shape.
The book Engineering in Pre-College Settings, edited by Purzer, Strobel and
Cardella, was a first example of such a publication. This book, however, was strongly
oriented on the USA situation. We saw the need for a book with a more international
orientation.
This book is the result of a cooperation between two groups that have both teacher
education and research in the field of STEM-related school subjects: the Department
of Learning (DoL) at KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm,
Sweden (the institute in which Lena Gumaelius and Inga-Britt Skogh work) and the
Department of Science Education and Communication (SEC) at Delft University
of Technology, the Netherlands (where Marc de Vries works). Both are groups that
function in a university environments that mainly consist of engineering departments
and engineering education programs and these groups take an interest in trying to
use the expertise in their own environment to enrich technology education in schools
with engineering elements. Given the context in which we educate teachers for
schools and do educational research, to us pre-university engineering education is a
‘natural’ activity.
Once we had decided to work on this book, we approached a number of colleagues
in different countries we knew were involved in the promotion and realisation of
pre-university engineering education in their countries. To our great pleasure, they
all immediately agreed to contribute to this book. We want to thank them for their
interest in cooperating with us, and their willingness to write and re-write their texts
for this book. We believe they have done excellent work and we are very pleased
with the outcome.
We want to thank the publisher, in particular Peter de Liefde, for his agreement in
having this book in Sense’s International Technology Education Studies book series.
Thanks also to other Sense colleagues who contributed to turning our manuscript
into a book with a nice appearance.
We hope readers will find this book a source of inspiration for working on pre-
university engineering education in their countries. At the moment it is still relatively
in state of infancy, but there are several interesting initiatives, which we have tried
to capture in this book. The coming years will show if pre-university engineering
vii
PREFACE
education will catch on. The trend towards STEM integrated education that today
can be seen in many countries will certainly create a further need and stimulus for
that to happen. Hopefully this book can contribute to such a development of both
formal and informal K-12 engineering education. Not only for preparing the next
generation of engineers, but also for the technological literacy of future citizens.
Lena Gumaelius, Inga-Britt Skogh & Marc J. de Vries
Stockholm/Delft, March 2016
viii
MARC J. DE VRIES, LENA GUMAELIUS AND INGA-BRITT SKOGH
1. PRE-UNIVERSITY ENGINEERING EDUCATION
An Introduction
THE ‘E’ IN STEM: NEWCOMER AND CHALLENGE
Probably we would not know about pre-university (or K-12, in USA terms)
engineering education if there had not been the discussion about STEM education.
STEM is the acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. The
term started its existence as a rather political term in the mid-2000s. Politicians at
a certain moment started calling for more people in STEM professions and more
students in STEM disciplines. The term STEM education then began to stand for
education that prepares for such professions and studies. In a way, that use of the term
was not obvious. Only three of the four characters in the acronym were known. For
many years already there had been science and mathematics education. Technology
education was a relative newcomer as this has emancipated from crafts and industrial
arts only since the 1980s and in some countries even later. But engineering education
was pretty much non-existent in pre-university education (in 2008 Brophy, Klein,
Portsmore & Rogers called it the ‘missing E’ and in 2014 Miaoulis still calls it the
‘missing discipline’). Yet its reference to a professional domain seemed to justify its
place in the acronym. STEM was not just chosen because it can be pronounced or
because STM already stood for Scanning Tunnelling Microscope and Synchronous
Transport Module. The E was seen as a necessary component in the combination of
science, technology and mathematics.
The inclusion on the E in STEM did, however, raise questions. What is the
difference between the T and the E? What is engineering education at pre-university
level anyway? It can be imagined that such question did not really bother the
politicians using the term STEM, but as soon as educators started reflecting on what
STEM education might look like in practice, such questions did become meaningful
and their answers were by no means obvious. Of course that question is not unique
for the E in STEM. The S, T and M go through regular cycles of redefinition and
reconfiguration. Currently we have the discussion on the Next Generation of Science
Standards in the USA. The introduction of these Standards in educational practice
will entail a rather drastic revision of science education with its new overarching
themes and ways of thinking. As many people believe, it will present a much better
and more realistic image of what scientists do (rather than just conveying the
traditional canon of existing knowledge, as it happens in most of current science
M. J. de Vries et al. (Eds.), Pre-university Engineering Education, 1–12.
© 2016 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.