Page 31 - Standards for K-12 Engineering Education

Standards for K-12 Engineering Education?

18 STANDARDS FOR K–12 ENGINEERING EDUCATION?

concepts and practices in engineering and to reflect current findings based on cognitive science.
Standards could also inform the creation of new instructional materials and shape engineering
teacher education programs.
For a subject new to most K–12 classrooms, standards can also make a statement about the
importance of that subject for students and for society at large. Thus standards for K–12
engineering education could help create an identity for engineering as a separate and important
discipline in the overall curriculum on a par with more established disciplines. This was an
important goal, for example, of the technology education community when it developed the
Standards for Technological Literacy (ITEA, 2000). Ultimately, standards have the potential to
expand the presence of high-quality, rigorous, relevant engineering education for K–12 students.
In working on this project, the committee collected and reviewed information about stan-
dards and standards-like documents for precollege engineering education developed by other
nations, including Australia, England and Wales, France, Germany, and South Africa (DeVries,
2009; also see Appendix B). Our efforts to draw meaningful inferences for education in the
United States were hindered by differences among educational systems and difficulties in finding
data on the extent and impact of standards.

The Argument Against Engineering Content Standards

Perhaps the most serious argument against developing content standards for K–12 engi-
neering education is our limited experience with K–12 engineering education in elementary and
secondary schools. Although there has been a considerable increase in the last 5 to 10 years, the
number of K–12 students, teachers, and schools engaged in engineering education is still
extremely small compared to the numbers for almost every other school subject.
For standards to have a chance of succeeding, there must be a critical mass of teachers
willing and able to deliver engineering instruction. Although no precise threshold number has
been determined, based on the committee’s experience with the development of standards in
other subjects, 10 percent seems a reasonable minimum. Based on the projected size of the
teaching force in 2010 in the U.S. K–12 educational system, this would represent about 380,000
teachers (NCES, 2008), a figure orders of magnitude larger than the estimated K–12 engineering
teaching force.
The most recent data available indicate that 40 states have adopted or adapted the Standards
for Technological Literacy. Of these, 12 require students to take at least one technology educa-
tion course (Dugger, 2007). It is not clear, however, whether these state standards include the
engineering content of the national technological literacy standards. More important, the
committee could find no reliable data indicating how many states assess student learning in
engineering. Without the pressure of an assessment, particularly an assessment with conse-
quences tied to student performance, teachers may have little incentive to teach engineering.
Another concern is mixed results for nationally developed consensus standards, which have
demonstrably influenced the content of state education standards and curricula (e.g., DeBoer,
2006), but have had varying impacts in different states. Overall, this has led to well documented
problems of a lack of coherence among standards, instructional practices, assessments and
accountability, and teacher professional development (NAEd, 2009; Rothman, 2003). Even
when standards influence the content of a curriculum, the material that is actually taught—the
enacted curriculum—is influenced much more by teachers’ beliefs and experiences than by
standards (Spillane, 2004; Weiss et al., 2003).

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