Page 108 - Standards for K-12 Engineering Education

Standards for K-12 Engineering Education?

APPENDIX B 93

Systems; 5. The Engineering Environment; and 6. Applied Design, Planning and Prototyping),
but the same types of behavioral expressions in the standards (e.g., the word “identifies” appears
frequently).

The French standards are structured in a different way and allow for substantial non-behavioral
terminology. All standards are divided into “competences” and “knowledge and related
knowledge” (the latter probably refers to knowledge related to certain competences). Here we
are quite far removed from the OBE approach.

Thus, we have seen a spectrum from a strong dominance of behavioral terms to equal space for
behavioral and non-behavioral terms. An interesting question, of course, is whether standards
ought to be formulated exclusively in a behavioral way or if non-behavioral standards can make
equal sense. Clearly, behavioral terms have the advantage of allowing for assessment in terms of
observable phenomena (e.g., if a standards says that a student is able to use a hammer, then
having the student perform this is a direct way of assessing whether or not this is true), although
some behavioral terms are more problematic than others. How can one “see” if a learner
“knows” something?

On the other hand, some caution about excluding non-behavioral standards may be healthy. Is it
really possible to express everything a learner has learned in terms of behavior? The philosophy
of technology has shown that some of what engineers know is “tacit” knowledge and is very
difficult to externalize (see, for instance, chapter 3 in my book, Teaching About Technology,
Springer, 2005). A second argument against the exclusion of non-behavioral standards is that
attitude theorists (e.g., Fishbein and Ajzen, Belief, Attitude, Intention and Behavior, Addison-
Wesley, 1975) have always emphasized that the relationship between attitudes as an internal
quality of people and actual behavior is indirect, at best. Does this mean that attitudinal stan-
dards should be banned because they cannot be assessed well by observing behavior? Probably
not, even though this still leaves open the question of how to assess such standards properly.

3.2 The Use of Levels in Standards
Another distinguishing feature in non-U.S. standards is the use of levels. We find levels also in
U.S. Standards for Technological Literacy, for which all 20 standards have been elaborated for
grade levels K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12. In the U.S. standards, levels are used to indicate the degree
of mastery through the various grade levels. However, indicating progression through levels of
standards is certainly not easy, as we see when we look at various standards in non-U.S.
countries. Some countries evidently have abstained from defining levels at all, and some
countries use levels not to indicate progression but to indicate the level of required mastery for
each individual standard.

In theory, one can think of several options for indicating progression through levels, some of
which are:

• from concrete to abstract
• from simple to complex
• from little to more of the same
• the addition of new elements for each level

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