Page 91 - Standards for K-12 Engineering Education

Standards for K-12 Engineering Education?

76 STANDARDS FOR K–12 ENGINEERING EDUCATION?

secondary level, and the applicability of concepts throughout the K-16 spectrum are equally
important. These issues are discussed in this section.
One important issue raised throughout the analysis had to do with the purpose of teaching
engineering at the secondary level. At one extreme, secondary-level engineering can be
considered pre-college education for students preparing for engineering courses on the college
level. At the other extreme, secondary-level engineering education that provides general
knowledge about engineering and how things are designed is appropriate, and even necessary, to
preparing all students to live in a technologically rich culture. The issues raised in this study are
whether the same concepts considered appropriate/important to engineering are also appropriate
for both pre-engineering and general literacy. A related issue is whether the engineering concepts
appropriate for secondary level education are applicable throughout the K–12 spectrum.

At a number of points in the analysis, it was apparent that engineering design is a central
and dominant conceptual theme. In some of the documents, particularly the curricular materials,
the focus was clearly on engineering design. The steps in the engineering design process (e.g.,
problem formulation, brainstorming, prototyping) were considered the framework for teaching
engineering. In other documents and in the focus groups, the discussion dealt with other aspects
of engineering (e.g., functionality, efficiency, systems, and optimization). Although these aspects
can also be considered to be subsumed by engineering design, they were presented as more
robust concepts independent of the steps in the engineering design process. Thus, design can be
considered the primary engineering concept or even a threshold concept (Meyer and Land,
2006). A threshold concept differs from a core concept in that it is “akin to a portal, opening up a
new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something” (p. 3). Engineering design
could provide the “portal” for all other engineering concepts and themes appropriate for K–12
students.

Throughout the analysis, the research team struggled with defining an engineering
epistemology and conceptual base that is appropriate only to engineering. The researchers
struggled to identify concepts and knowledge that related strictly and distinctly to engineering.
The team concluded that doing so was problematic for two primary reasons. First, the
engineering field includes a spectrum of disciplines, each of which tends to draw on knowledge
specific to that discipline. For example, the knowledge base for nuclear engineering is distinct
from the knowledge base for civil engineering; each discipline has a pool of knowledge
necessary to conduct activities and analyses specific to that field. The question was whether
engineering disciplines have a common conceptual core that can be generalized across
disciplines. The second problem with conceptualizing an engineering epistemology is that much
of engineering is grounded in and interwoven with knowledge from other academic disciplines,
particularly science and mathematics. The same problem arises with respect to technology,
namely, that technological knowledge is essentially derived from the application of knowledge
from other disciplines.

The issue of engineering knowledge extends beyond epistemology to “engineering
practice” and “engineering dispositions.” This became clear in the focus group discussions where
attempts were made to draw distinctions between concepts that engineers primarily know and
those they primarily do. Given the applied, socially grounded, contextual nature of engineering
practice, these are interesting distinctions. As Childress and Sanders (2007) pointed out, the
ABET Criteria 2000 emphasize teaching dispositions, such as communication and lifelong
learning, instead of specific engineering concepts. A directly related issue is that social science

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