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1. Physics students who teach cultivate a deeper sense of professional identity

   Simmonds., P; Wenner, J.A.; Frary, M.; Llewellyn, D. (March 2022, APS March Meeting 2022)

   Historically, graduate education’s goal was to prepare future academics, and has thus focused on the creation and conservation of disciplinary knowledge. However, today’s reality is that most STEM graduate students (GSs) go on to non-academic careers. As educators, it should be our aim to equip GSs for success, regardless of career aspirations. It is therefore essential that we shift our focus towards preparing a new type of scholar – one with a strong professional identity – rather than preparing a person for a specific type of career. We argue that helping students cultivate a professional identity has been largely missing from physics graduate education. Connecting ideas across disciplines and applying abstract knowledge to real problems—as one does when teaching—is a necessity for the development of a strong professional identity. It is hence the integration of knowledge transformation (teaching) into graduate physics education that led us to create the Graduate Identity Formation through Teaching (GIFT) project. In GIFT, GSs are supported to construct adult-level, inquiry-based, 30-minute lessons based on specific K–6 Next Generation Science Standards. The GSs serve as disciplinary experts by teaching their lesson to elementary teacher candidates (TCs). The TCs then turn this knowledge into 15-minute mini-lessons for elementary students. Finally, the GSs observe the TCs teaching the lesson to K–6 students and reflect on the entire experience. We will present results from four semesters of GIFT showing that project participation promotes the development of GS professional identity, with implications for how we can support physics GSs in terms of their current educational activities and their future careers. 

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2. Those Who Don’t Teach…Should Learn

   Wenner, J.A.; Simmonds, P.J.; Frary, M.; Llewellyn, D. (January 2022, 2022 Association for Science Teacher Education Conference)

   “Those who can’t do, teach.” This hurtful adage continues to be common, implying that those who are teachers are somehow lesser, not quite as smart, or could not make it in a ‘better’ profession. However, one could argue that this adage – and the damage it wreaks – persists because the general public does not fully understand what teachers do and the expertise involved in teaching well. The question then becomes, how can science educators provide an accurate picture of science education with those outside the field? The assumption being that a better-educated public may be more supportive in a number of spheres. Therefore, the purpose of this roundtable will to be to discuss the unexpected findings from a project that pairs STEM graduate students (GSs) with elementary teacher candidates (TCs) for the purposes of TCs learning content knowledge for lesson planning. These findings include themes of the difficulties involved in planning an effective lesson; the difference between content and teaching expertise; seeing teaching as a well-honed skill; and, finding ways to give back to the field of education. Viewed through the lens of disciplinary stewardship (both on the part of the GSs and TCs), we see these unanticipated findings as something that could perhaps be expanded into more purposeful collaborations in the future and would like to discuss these possibilities further with others in our field. Related to the conference theme of “Why Science Education?” this roundtable presentation intends to engage science educators in considering how to support those outside the field to answer this question as well as the question, “Why Teach Science in Particular Ways?” in a thoughtful manner such that we may cultivate more advocates for high-quality science education within the general public. 

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3. Partnering Undergraduate Engineering Students with Preservice Teachers to Design and Teach an Elementary Engineering Lesson Through Ed+gineering

   Gutierrez, K.; Ringleb, S.; Kidd, J.; Ayala, O.; Pazos, P.; Kaipa, K. (June 2020, 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Online)

   Major challenges in engineering education include retention of undergraduate engineering students (UESs) and continued engagement after the first year when concepts increase in difficulty. Additionally, employers, as well as ABET, look for students to demonstrate non-technical skills, including the ability to work successfully in groups, the ability to communicate both within and outside their discipline, and the ability to find information that will help them solve problems and contribute to lifelong learning. Teacher education is also facing challenges given the recent incorporation of engineering practices and core ideas into the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and state level standards of learning. To help teachers meet these standards in their classrooms, education courses for preservice teachers (PSTs) must provide resources and opportunities to increase science and engineering knowledge, and the associated pedagogies. To address these challenges, Ed+gineering, an NSF-funded multidisciplinary collaborative service learning project, was implemented into two sets of paired-classes in engineering and education: a 100 level mechanical engineering class (n = 42) and a foundations class in education (n = 17), and a fluid mechanics class in mechanical engineering technology (n = 23) and a science methods class (n = 15). The paired classes collaborated in multidisciplinary teams of 5-8 undergraduate students to plan and teach engineering lessons to local elementary school students. Teams completed a series of previously tested, scaffolded activities to guide their collaboration. Designing and delivering lessons engaged university students in collaborative processes that promoted social learning, including researching and planning, peer mentoring, teaching and receiving feedback, and reflecting and revising their engineering lesson. The research questions examined in this pilot, mixed-methods research study include: (1) How did PSTs’ Ed+gineering experiences influence their engineering and science knowledge?; (2) How did PSTs’ and UESs’ Ed+gineering experiences influence their pedagogical understanding?; and (3) What were PSTs’ and UESs’ overall perceptions of their Ed+gineering experiences? Both quantitative (e.g., Engineering Design Process assessment, Science Content Knowledge assessment) and qualitative (student reflections) data were used to assess knowledge gains and project perceptions following the semester-long intervention. Findings suggest that the PSTs were more aware and comfortable with the engineering field following lesson development and delivery, and often better able to explain particular science/engineering concepts. Both PSTs and UESs, but especially the latter, came to realize the importance of planning and preparing lessons to be taught to an audience. UESs reported greater appreciation for the work of educators. PSTs and UESs expressed how they learned to work in groups with multidisciplinary members—this is a valuable lesson for their respective professional careers. Yearly, the Ed+gineering research team will also request and review student retention reports in their respective programs to assess project impact. 

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4. Preparing undergraduates for the post-pandemic workplace: Teams of education and engineering students teach engineering virtually

   https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02383-6  

   Gutierrez, Kristie S; Kidd, Jennifer J; Lee, Min J; Pazos, Pilar; Kaipa, Krishnanand; Ayala, Orlando (December 2023, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications)

   When schools and universities across the world transitioned online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Ed+gineering, a National Science Foundation (NSF) project that partners engineering and education undergraduates to design and deliver engineering lessons to elementary students, also had to shift its hands-on lessons to a virtual format. Through the lens of social cognitive theory (SCT), this study investigates engineering and education students’ experiences during the shift to online instruction to understand how they perceived its influence on their learning. As a result of modifying their lessons for online delivery, students reported learning professional skills, including skills for teaching online and educational technology skills, as well as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) content. Some also lamented missed learning opportunities, like practice presenting face-to-face. Students’ affective responses were often associated with preparing and delivering their lessons. SCT sheds light on how the mid-semester change in their environment, caused by the shift in designing and teaching from face-to-face to online, affected the undergraduate engineering and education students’ personal experiences and affect. Overall, the transition to fully online was effective for students’ perceived learning and teaching of engineering. Though students experienced many challenges developing multimedia content for delivering hands-on lessons online, they reported learning new skills and knowledge and expressed positive affective responses. From the gains reported by undergraduates, we believe that this cross-disciplinary virtual team assignment was a successful strategy for helping undergraduates build competencies in virtual skills. We posit that similar assignment structures and opportunities post-pandemic will also continue to prepare future students for the post-pandemic workplace. 

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5. What do Undergraduate Engineering Students and Pre-service Teachers Learn by Collaborating and Teaching Engineering and Coding Through Robotics?

   Kidd, J.; Kaipa, K.; Sacks, S.; Ringleb, S.; Pazos, P.; Gutierrez, K.; Ayala, O. M.; de Souza Almeida, L. M. (June 2020, 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Online)

   This research paper presents preliminary results of an NSF-supported interdisciplinary collaboration between undergraduate engineering students and preservice teachers. The fields of engineering and elementary education share similar challenges when it comes to preparing undergraduate students for the new demands they will encounter in their profession. Engineering students need interprofessional skills that will help them value and negotiate the contributions of various disciplines while working on problems that require a multidisciplinary approach. Increasingly, the solutions to today's complex problems must integrate knowledge and practices from multiple disciplines and engineers must be able to recognize when expertise from outside their field can enhance their perspective and ability to develop innovative solutions. However, research suggests that it is challenging even for professional engineers to understand the roles, responsibilities, and integration of various disciplines, and engineering curricula have traditionally left little room for development of non-technical skills such as effective communication with a range of audiences and an ability to collaborate in multidisciplinary teams. Meanwhile, preservice teachers need new technical knowledge and skills that go beyond traditional core content knowledge, as they are now expected to embed engineering into science and coding concepts into traditional subject areas. There are nationwide calls to integrate engineering and coding into PreK-6 education as part of a larger campaign to attract more students to STEM disciplines and to increase exposure for girls and minority students who remain significantly underrepresented in engineering and computer science. Accordingly, schools need teachers who have not only the knowledge and skills to integrate these topics into mainstream subjects, but also the intention to do so. However, research suggests that preservice teachers do not feel academically prepared and confident enough to teach engineering-related topics. This interdisciplinary project provided engineering students with an opportunity to develop interprofessional skills as well as to reinforce their technical knowledge, while preservice teachers had the opportunity to be exposed to engineering content, more specifically coding, and develop competence for their future teaching careers. Undergraduate engineering students enrolled in a computational methods course and preservice teachers enrolled in an educational technology course partnered to plan and deliver robotics lessons to fifth and sixth graders. This paper reports on the effects of this collaboration on twenty engineering students and eight preservice teachers. T-tests were used to compare participants’ pre-/post- scores on a coding quiz. A post-lesson written reflection asked the undergraduate students to describe their robotics lessons and what they learned from interacting with their cross disciplinary peers and the fifth/sixth graders. Content analysis was used to identify emergent themes. Engineering students’ perceptions were generally positive, recounting enjoyment interacting with elementary students and gaining communication skills from collaborating with non-technical partners. Preservice teachers demonstrated gains in their technical knowledge as measured by the coding quiz, but reported lacking the confidence to teach coding and robotics independently of their partner engineering students. Both groups reported gaining new perspectives from working in interdisciplinary teams and seeing benefits for the fifth and sixth grade participants, including exposing girls and students of color to engineering and computing. 

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