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Engineering Structured Poster Session: During these 75-minute concurrent sessions, up to 12 presenting projects will share information about their work related to engineering education with each other and with attendees interested in the topic. Following brief introductions, interactive poster presentation and viewing occured in two rounds, and the session concluded with facilitated discussion across all projects. 

Teachers in rural schools have consistently faced challenges in accessing high-quality professional learning (PL). Approximately 150 rural teachers in four states received intensive, online summer PL paired with a variety of Modest Supports throughout the following school year. We used Picciano’s multi-modal online educational model in characterizing the online summer PL and to evaluate the effectiveness of the Modest Supports. End-of-year surveys and interviews with teachers asked about their experiences with and perceptions of the Modest Supports. Initial descriptive statistics and thematic analysis found that teachers reported using the collaborative Modest Supports much more frequently than others and that they were more helpful and created a sense of community within the project while also supporting their NGSS learning and implementation. 

Many professional learning (PL) opportunities with inservice teachers often focus on enhancing their understanding of the nature of engineering and the work of engineers. However, few studies connect inservice teachers’ conceptualizations of science and engineering and how these inform their classroom practice. Therefore, this study explores inservice elementary teachers’ conceptions of teaching science and engineering and how they connect their understandings of these disciplines to classroom practice. We examined the breakout discussions of 11 inservice elementary teachers regarding five vignettes of science and engineering classroom activities in a completely online PL experience. We employed the Attending-Interpreting-Responding (AIR) Teacher Noticing Framework and followed a six-step thematic analysis process by Braun and Clark (2012). These steps included collaborative sense-making sessions to discuss the descriptive coding (Saldaña, 2021) generated during independent coding sessions. Our analysis revealed several consistent key (mis)conceptions about teaching science and engineering. Teachers often characterized engineering classroom activities as tasks where students should be building and solving a problem, while they characterized science as involving observation and learning content knowledge about a topic. When describing a vignette as engineering, teachers often used the words goal, problem, and purpose interchangeably. Additionally, we uncovered teachers’ misconceptions about science that do not align with the nature of science or science and engineering practices. This gap in how teachers make sense of classroom science and engineering tasks versus how they conceptualize science and engineering disciplines highlights a significant need to address in teacher education.