Engineering curriculum often fails to connect content and decisions to impacts on diverse, particularly marginalized, communities. Given that integration of social justice ideas into curriculum is currently uncommon among most faculty, we provide resources in the form of a workshop to help catalyze these efforts by teaching faculty how to…

National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) programs provide opportunities for professional development for teachers. The goal of the RET site at North Dakota State University (NDSU), established in May 2020 (NSF Awards #1953102 and #2224135), was to increase the knowledge of secondary (6th to 12th grade)…

Given the current emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education and its key attributes, middle school is an optimal time to implement STEM-based curricula. However, the interdisciplinary and open-ended nature of STEM projects often makes implementation difficult. In this article, we describe a professional development…

Background: Integration of engineering into middle school science and mathematics classrooms is a key aspect of STEM integration. However, successful pedagogies for teachers to use engineering talk in their classrooms are not fully understood. Purpose/Hypothesis: This study aims to address this need with the research question: How does a middle…

Background: With widespread adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in the USA (US), research is needed on how secondary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers conceptualize the integration of engineering knowledge and practices in traditional STEM classrooms. The present study explored the affective…

Purpose: This study aims to identify various teachers' professional activities (TPAs) and classify these TPAs according to their relative importance for the professional development of teachers. Design/methodology/approach: The systematic review of the literature had been conducted to identify various TPAs in the institutions. Later, an empirical…

Although the consensus seems to be that high-school-level introductory engineering courses should focus on design, this creates a problem for teacher training. Traditionally, math and science teachers are trained to teach and assess factual knowledge and closed-ended problem-solving techniques specific to a particular discipline, which is unsuited…

Background: Teachers can have a significant impact on student interest and learning in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) subjects and careers. Teacher self-efficacy can also significantly affect student learning. Researchers investigated the effects of teacher professional development and integrated STEM curriculum development on…

It is difficult to ignore the increased use of technological innovations in today's world, which has led to various calls for the integration of engineering into K-12 science standards. The need to understand how engineering is currently being brought to science classrooms is apparent and necessary in order to address these calls for integration.…

Project-based learning (PBL) in the science classroom provides an opportunity for students to investigate socioscientific issues that are current, authentic, and relevant. In a typical PBL unit, the teacher designs a narrative plan and acts as a facilitator who helps gather and organize student ideas. The framework of the Next Generation Science…

Engineering education research has empirically validated the effectiveness of active learning over traditional instructional methods. However, the dissemination of education research into instructional practice has been slow. Faculty workshops for current and future instructors offer a solution to promote the widespread adoption of active learning…

As they prepared for the 2016-2017 school year, administrators and teachers at Design Tech High School ("d.tech"), a public charter school in Northern California, decided they needed a deeper understanding of how students learn. According to Nicole Cerra, Director of Learning, "Obviously you need to get to know students…

To gain a better understanding of teachers' beliefs about, perceptions of, and classroom practices using STEM integration, a multi-case case study was conducted with three middle school teachers. These teachers were purposefully selected from a pool of teachers involved in a year-long professional development module on STEM integration to…

The purpose of this study was to explore the engineering problem finding ability of high school students at three high schools in Minnesota. Students at each of the three schools had differing backgrounds including pre-engineering coursework, traditional technology education coursework and advanced science coursework. Students were asked to find…

The purpose of this study was to describe a process of preparing technology education teachers to teach engineering design concepts in the context of technology education. This process was identified through a study of professional development activities that were organized and conducted by technology teacher education partner universities of the…