Page 144 - Standards for K-12 Engineering Education

Standards for K-12 Engineering Education?

APPENDIX B 129

The predominant theme here is mastery of mathematics. No mention is made of learning through
technology or engineering.

Technology and Engineering in State Standards

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 required that all states develop challenging academic content and
student achievement standards in mathematics and science by the 2005–2006 school year. To remain
eligible for federal funding, all states complied. In this section we look first at how technology and
engineering fared in science standards and then how they fared in mathematics standards.

Recognizing the importance of technological literacy for all citizens, a number of states incorporated
technology and engineering standards into their science standards. Massachusetts, for example, includes
a K–12 strand for technology/engineering alongside (and of equal importance to) strands for physical
science, life science, and Earth and space science. However, the content of technology and engineering
standards included in state science frameworks overall is uneven. An analysis of the science frameworks
in 49 states (Koehler et al., 2005, 2006) found that nearly all include technology in their standards, but the
content of those standards is far from what it needs to be.

. . . the nexus between engineering concepts and states science frameworks revolves around
socioeconomic issues. This may be in part due to the influence of the science, technology and society
(STS) movement in science education that began in the 1980s. Particularly, the socioeconomic
content is described as how economics, politics and ethics coupled with technological development
permeates the discipline of science. It is the means by which state science frameworks incorporate
technology into their curriculums. While STS has been the traditional link between science content
and technology, it is not a sufficient means to introduce engineering education and technical literacy
into the high school setting. Instead, it is vital that science education focus on actual technology-
based content integrated into the science curriculum as a means to promote technical literacy.
(Koehler et al., 2006)

When STS standards were left out of the analysis, regional differences emerged, with states in the
Northeast including the greatest number of technology and engineering standards and states in the
Southeast and Mountain West region the fewest.

In addition, state mathematics frameworks are based on a different definition of “technology” than state
science frameworks. In a descriptive analysis of the mathematics grade-level expectations in 42 states,
the term “calculators/technology” refers to the use of electronic devices as tools to communicate concepts
or solve problems (Reys, 2006). Of the 31 states that mention calculators, seven specify that students
should not use them, and “all of the documents referring to calculators/technology are explicit in
emphasizing that these tools do not replace the need for computational fluency” (Reys, 2006, p. 6). The
authors conclude that the use of computational technology is relatively unimportant in state standards.
This is a key issue in the “math wars,” so it is not surprising that others disagree with this conclusion:

One of the most debilitating trends in current state math standards is their excessive emphasis on
calculators. Most standards documents call upon students to use them starting in the elementary
grades, often beginning with Kindergarten. Calculators enable students to do arithmetic quickly,
without thinking about the numbers involved in a calculation. For this reason, using them in a high
school science class, for example, is perfectly sensible. But for elementary students, the main goal of
math education is to get them to think about numbers and to learn arithmetic. Calculators defeat that

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