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This work-in-progress research-to-practice paper presents the development and pilot implementation of curriculum that introduces semiconductor contents in a high school calculus class. The demand for chips soared through the COVID-19 pandemic, exposing our country's semiconductor manufacturing and supply chain risks. The need to reassert US semiconductor leadership will require training a well-educated workforce, starting at the K-12 level. Meanwhile, K-12 STEM teachers often juggle the conflicting requirements of standardized tests and the need to cultivate 21st-century skills, deeper learning, and transferable knowledge, among others. This paper presents a pilot implementation that could address both problems. Selected teachers attended an NSF-funded Research Experience for Teachers (RET) summer program to learn about chip design basics. They also received curriculum development support to design new modules on semiconductor topics that would attract their students' interests.
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This content will become publicly available on June 1, 2026
BOARD # 297: RET: Acquisition and Retainment of Semiconductor Knowledge among K-12 STEM Teachers
This brief summarizes the first two years of participants’ data from a National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) project on Chip Design (Chip-RET). Semiconductor workforce development has become a national priority due to microchips’ importance to our supply chain security, national defense, and technological leadership. K-14 teachers play a pivotal role in exciting, motivating, and preparing students to join various microelectronics-related career pathways. To meet such requirements, K-14 STEM teachers need to receive the necessary training on the subject matter. Our institution proposed the Chip-RET, the first RET program in the US that focused exclusively on integrated circuit design and K-14 semiconductor education. To evaluate the effectiveness of such training, we further developed a custom semiconductor knowledge and literacy test (SKLT), whose content and interpretation have been validated by semiconductor industry experts. Our data reveals that the Year One cohort of ten teachers demonstrated an increase in their mean percentage of correct responses to the SKLT test, from 39% to 65% pre- and post-RET. A follow-up Wilcoxon Rank-Sum Test underscored the significance of this difference, with a W-value of 3 and a p-value less than 0.001. Moreover, a repeat measure of the SKLT test nine months after the Chip-RET training (post-9 months) showed a mean percentage of correct response of 55%, suggesting that participants were able to retain much of their knowledge gained nearly one year after the training. A Wilcoxon Rank-Sum Test from pre- to post-9 months showed a W-value of 12 and a p-value of 0.007, further confirming the gain despite some loss of knowledge over the nine-month period. Finally, the Year Two cohort of another ten teachers also showed an increase from 48% to 69% pre- and post-RET. The post-9-month data is not yet available and will be collected.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2206941
- PAR ID:
- 10657283
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASEE Conferences
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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