Page 28 - Standards for K-12 Engineering Education

Standards for K-12 Engineering Education?

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Arguments For and Against Content Standards

for K–12 Engineering Education

This chapter presents the arguments for and against the development and implementation of
content standards for K–12 engineering education. However, to make sense of the arguments,
one must first understand the nature of existing content standards for other school subjects. Con-
tent standards describe subject-specific knowledge, skills, and dispositions that elementary and
secondary students are expected to have mastered at different points in their educational careers.
These expectations are usually expressed in grade bands, such as kindergarten–grade 2, grades
3–5, grades 6–8, and grades 9–12.
Ideally, content standards draw on studies in the cognitive sciences showing the development
of conceptual understanding. Also ideally, standards support the progressive development of
conceptual understanding, dispositions, and skills across grades and make explicit connections
between related concepts. Researchers have been working to tease out such learning pro-
gressions in science education (e.g., Corcoran et al., 2009), but the committee is unaware of this
kind of research in K–12 engineering education.
In reality, however, evidence about the nature and progression of learning is far from
complete. Even though more data are available to guide standards development now than were
available 20 or even 10 years ago, there are still gaps, especially in school subjects as new as
engineering. To address these gaps, standards developers typically rely on the expert judgment
of teachers, curriculum developers, and others with direct experience with students in the
classroom.
It is important to remember that standards differ from the curriculum, which can be
summarized as the scope and sequence of teaching and learning in the classroom. The curric-
ulum is informed by standards. As described in Box 1-1, content standards also differ from pro-
gram standards, assessment standards, and standards for professional development.
In addition, the implementation of standards in individual classrooms does not always match
the vision of the original developers. Sometimes less material is covered than is described in the
standards. Sometimes more material is covered. In addition, the material that is tested—which
is sometimes synonymous with what is considered important—may be only part of what has
been taught.
Historically in the United States, content standards have been developed through a consensus
process at the national level by coalitions of organizations and individuals with interests and
expertise in the subject area. As noted by Bybee (2009), given sufficient resources, expertise,

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