Nearly one-fifth of U.S. children attend rural schools; however, these students have fewer opportunities for high-quality STEM learning. Rural students are also less likely to attend college and less likely to enroll in STEM majors than their urban and suburban peers. In conjunction with these factors, female students are also less likely to…

Learning to teach science using engineering design is a complex endeavor for elementary preservice teachers (PSTs). This entails helping PSTs understand students as sense makers and recognizing ways to notice, respond, and leverage their students' ideas throughout the design process. In this study, we follow a cohort of elementary PSTs through a…

With the increasing importance of teaching STEM to young students, the engineering design process (EDP) has become a popular learning platform in K-12 STEM education. The engineering design process guides students in solving engineering problems, but there is a lack of understanding of how students utilize this process. In this study, we explored…

In the current study, an engineering design-based STEM activity was designed and implemented for 5th graders. The current activity is expected to provide guidance and perspective to teachers (practitioners) in designing and implementing an activity based on design-based learning, STEM activity, and engineering design process (EDP). At the same…

The activity presented in this article is an engaging engineering challenge that has been conducted with third- through fifth-grade students in school classrooms and during after-school programs. This article describes the hands-on activity as appropriate for fifth graders that supports the "Next Generation Science Standards." This…

This column presents ideas and techniques to enhance your science teaching. This month's issue shares information on how students' everyday experiences can support science learning through engineering design. In this article, the authors outline a reverse-engineering model of instruction and describe one example of how it looked in our fifth-grade…

Engineering is an intriguing way for students to connect the design process with their knowledge of science (NRC 2012). This article describes the "Engineering a Pancake Recipe" design process which was created to make the structure and properties of matter more meaningful for fifth grade students. The whole pancake recipe engineering…

Access to drinking water is becoming more limited as drought persists across continents. This article highlights a particularly impacted group of students due to increasing drought conditions and upstream river pollution near their reservation. While there are related water and modeling standards across the K-12 Next Generation Science Standards…

The aim of this research is to determine the effectiveness of the STEM Kid Module on the scientific literacy of fifth-grade students in the 'Energy' topic. The module was developed based on the combination of constructivism and constructionism as a fundamental learning theory. Meanwhile, the STEM Kid instructional phase was formed using a STEM…

This study investigated the technologies and tools used to support upper-level elementary students' engineering design and problem-solving activities in a bridge design and building challenge. The study was conducted in an eight-week afterschool program with a total of 36 4th to 6th grade students in small groups of four to six students. Analysis…

Background: As engineering becomes increasingly incorporated into precollege classrooms, it is important to explore students' ability to engage in engineering practices. One of these practices, "engaging in argument from evidence," has been well studied in science education. However, it has not yet been fully explored in engineering…

This mixed-methods study examines how teachers who have taught one or two units of the Engineering is Elementary (EiE) curriculum for two years reported on: students' responses to design failure; the ways in which they, the teachers, supported these students and used fail words (e.g. fail, failure); and the teachers' broad perspectives and…

What better way to engage fifth-grade students in science and engineering practices than to use paper airplanes to encourage them to question, explore, create, and test designs! This multi-day unit draws from a fourth-grade curriculum (Pearson 2012) aligned with the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS Lead States 2013) used in…

This article describes a new and unique context for integrating STEM and literacy instruction--Novel Engineering. Oftentimes, STEM design challenges are focused on developing solutions to the big problems that humans face such as cleaning up oil spills or contrived situations in which children are tasked with building solutions to hypothetical…

Research around problem solving in collaborative groups has made progress, but several conceptual and methodological issues remain. These issues include the appropriate choices of units of analysis; the ability of current theoretical sets of macrocognition codes to capture group dynamics; detection and identification of potentially emergent…