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Increasing emphasis is being placed by granting agencies on the need for specialists who support the translation of research into societal benefits. This societal benefit is often referred to as broader impacts (BI), and BI is important for acquiring grant funding and fulfilling land-grant university missions, among other benefits. However, few career paths lead directly to becoming a BI professional, so individuals moving into BI work need to transition from another career, which requires learning about BI. This case study examines the experiences of four former classroom teachers making the transition to both teacher educator (a teacher of teachers) and BI professional, and the ways in which their transition was supported using the Center for Advancing Research Impacts in Society (ARIS) BI Toolkit. Implications for onboarding using this toolkit are described and recommendations are made for how to use the ARIS BI Toolkit for transitioning BI professionals. 

This fundamental research in pre-college education engineering study investigates the ways in which elementary school students and their teacher balance the tradeoffs in engineering design. STEM education reforms promote the engagement of K-12 students in the epistemic practices of disciplinary experts to teach content.1,2,3 This emphasis on practices is a paradigm shift that requires both extensive professional development and research to learn about the ways in which students and teacher learn about and participate in these practices. Balancing tradeoffs is an important practice in engineering but most often in classroom curricula it is embedded in the concept of iteration1,4; however, improving a design is not always the same as balancing trade-offs.1 Optimizing a multivariate problem requires students to engage in a number of engineering practices, like considering multiple solution, making tradeoffs between criteria and constraints, applying math and science knowledge to problem solving, constructing models, making evidence-based decisions, and assessing the implications of solutions5. The ways in which teachers and students collectively balance these tradeoffs in a design has been understudied1. Our primary research questions are, “How do teachers and students make decisions about making tradeoffs between criteria and constraints” and “How do experiences in teacher workshops affect the ways they implement engineering projects in their classes.” We take an ethnographic perspective to investigate these phenomena, and collected video data, field notes, student journals, and semi-structured interviews of eight elementary teachers in a workshop and similar data from two of the workshop teachers’ classes as they implemented the curriculum they learned in the workshop. Our analyses focus on the disciplinary practices teachers and students use to make decisions for balancing tradeoffs, how they are supported (or impeded) by teachers, and how they justify these decisions. Similarly, we compared two of the teachers wearing their “student hat” in the workshop as well as their “teacher hat” in the classroom5. Our analyses suggest three significant findings. First, teachers and students tended to focus on one criterion (e.g. cost, performance) and had few discussions about trying to minimize cost and maximize performance. Second, curriculum design significantly impacts the choices students make. Using two examples, we will show the impact of weighting criteria differently on the design strategies teachers and students make. Last, we noted most of the feedback given was related to managing classroom activity rather than supporting students’ designs. Implications of this study are relevant to both engineering educators and engineering curriculum developers. 

Despite the recent emphasis on the importance of K-12 students engaging in engineering content and practices, there has been little research done about how teachers learn engineering practices through teacher workshops and even less on how they utilize those experiences to teach engineering in their classes. Using methods of interactional ethnography, we analyzed data from an online teacher workshop in which elementary teachers engineered solutions to a multi-criteria problem in which balancing tradeoffs was a key practice. We found that teachers tended to focus on one criterion rather than both and lacked strategies to consider balancing these tradeoffs. We also found that a second iteration afforded all groups to demonstrate learning through improvement. Implications are discussed related to the importance of a focus on balancing tradeoffs in teacher learning and on pedagogy of engineering projects.