Page 102 - Standards for K-12 Engineering Education

Standards for K-12 Engineering Education?

APPENDIX B 87

changes in the country. After the abolishment of apartheid, it was necessary to ensure a good
level of education for all demographic groups in the country, in particular to raise the level of
education among black people. Compulsory education since the curriculum revisions is called
outcomes-based education (OBE) to indicate that outcome indicators play a vital role in
assessing the effectiveness of the curriculum. The outcomes are defined in terms of standards,
similar to the system in the United States.

All South African education claims to be OBE, which is reflected in the Assessment Standards
that have been formulated nationally. These standards are consistently phrased in terms of the
behavior that is to be displayed. As in the U.K., there are three levels, one for each grade in
higher secondary education. Some interesting features in these levels are four groups of
“learning outcomes” for each engineering program. In my previous report, information was only
available for the Electrical Engineering course, but I can now present information about four
engineering courses—Civil Engineering, Electrical Technology, Mechanical Technology, and

Engineering Graphics and Design. The learning outcomes are:

1. Technology, society and the environment
2. Technological process
3. Knowledge and understanding
4. Application of knowledge

For some of these outcomes, particularly for the process outcomes, there is no progression from
one grade to the next. This is justified in the document because “the progress is in the degree of
complexity of the content/contexts (of the process).” No further explanation is given, nor does
the description of the content/contexts provide any clues as to what this means.

Another interesting feature is that a separation is made between standards and content/contexts.
For each engineering domain, there is a list of standards for each of the four learning outcomes
and a list of content/contexts for the same four groups. Like the standards, the content/contexts
are generally described in behavioral terms (“understand,” “evaluate,” make,” etc.). If there is
no progression in the levels in the content/contexts, the same justification is given—the
progression is in the degree of complexity of the content in the Learning Outcomes (see Table 4
for a sample). In the analysis in Section 3 of this report, I will show that the nature of these
content/contexts is not unproblematic.

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