Page 40 - Standards for K-12 Engineering Education

Standards for K-12 Engineering Education?

LEVERAGING EXISTING STANDARDS 27

National Assessments. Infusion of engineering-related concepts is also occurring in national
assessments, which are based largely on current standards documents. For example, the 2009
science assessment framework of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP)
requires that 10 percent of test items be devoted to assessing students’ understanding of
technological design, which is defined as a “science practice” (WestEd, 2007). A planned
assessment of “technology and engineering literacy” being developed by the National
Assessment Governing Board places significant emphasis on students’ knowledge of the
engineering design process (WestEd, 2010).
NAEP results, which are based on national sampling techniques, are important tools for
tracking trends in student achievement and are used as benchmarks against certain international
assessments. However, because NAEP assessments are considered to be “low stakes,” that is,
there are no meaningful consequences tied to good or poor performance, they have had minimal
influence on teachers’ instructional practices or students’ motivation (Wise and DeMars, 2003).

State Standards

Currently, standards at the state level vary widely. Infusion thus will depend on the status of
engineering education, the standards already adopted, openness to considering engineering as a
significant K–12 discipline, and the level of involvement of postsecondary engineering faculty in
K–12 education. Historically, as was noted in Chapter 2, the implementation of national content
standards begins when states adapt them for their own purposes. Although both sets of national
science education standards and the technological literacy standards are infused to varying
degrees with engineering concepts—and more infusion is possible—the question is to what
extent these concepts appear—or might appear in the future—at the state level. The possible
emergence of common core science standards raises new possibilities, as well as constraints, for
the inclusion of engineering learning goals.
A few states, including Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode
Island, Tennessee, Vermont, and Washington, already include engineering learning goals, often
2
in combination with technology concepts, in their science education standards (Jacob Foster,
Massachusetts Department of Education, personal communication, 2/3/10). Infusion at the state
3
level can take numerous forms. In Minnesota, Nature of Science and Engineering, one of four
science-content strands, is meant to be embedded and used in the other three: Physical Sciences,
Earth and Space Sciences, and Life Sciences (MDE, 2010). In Washington State, engineering
ideas related to systems and problem solving are included as cross-cutting “essential academic
learning requirements” (State of Washington OSPI, 2009)). In New York, science standards
related to Analysis, Inquiry, and Design include learning goals related to engineering design
(NYSDE, 1996a), and standards related to Interconnectedness: Common Themes, address a

2 Although the committee considers it unlikely, one or more state standards for mathematics may include
engineering-related content. However, because of budgetary and time constraints, the committee was unable to
investigate this possibility.
3
Koehler et al. (2006) mapped concepts from their own framework (Koehler et al., 2005) for high school
engineering education to state science standards and found some alignment in nearly every state, with higher
correspondence in states in New England and the Mid-Atlantic region. The researchers’ alignment methodology
relied on a very broad definition of engineering, however, and it is not clear that all of the instances of engineering
in science standards would be classified that way by others.

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