Page 96 - Standards for K-12 Engineering Education

Standards for K-12 Engineering Education?

APPENDIX B 81

Report for NAE on Non-U.S. Standards for Pre-University Engineering
Education

Marc J. de Vries
Delft University of Technology/Eindhoven University of Technology
The Netherlands

1. Background of the Report
As part of an ongoing project, the National Academies has studied pre-university engineering
initiatives, with a focus on curriculum. Part of that project was a survey of non-U.S. initiatives.
The emphasis in the report I wrote for that project was on the content and practice of those non-
U.S. programs. My conclusions were that there are some initiatives outside the United States,
and to varying degrees they attempt to integrate science and math, serve pre-vocational and
general education purposes, cover a spectrum of engineering domains, contain basic engineering
concepts, and attempt to improve the public image of engineering. In this report, I investigate
standards for pre-university engineering education, also from outside the United States.

The steps in producing this report were as follows:

• First, a survey was made by Carolyn Williams (University of California) and Greg
Pearson (NAE), in which they selected non-U.S. initiatives.
• This material was handed to Marc de Vries (author of this report), who added some
additional initiatives from less accessible languages (German and French).
• An outline of the final report was communicated to Greg Pearson to see if the needs of
the committee would be served by the proposed content.
• The author made an analytical study of what the committee could learn from the selected
initiatives. The present report includes descriptions based on the Williams/Pearson
survey and the additions by the author and the author’s analysis.

Not surprisingly, the standards found in the preliminary survey by Carolyn Williams (University
of California) and Greg Pearson (NAE) were directly related to the curriculum initiatives used in
the previous project. In my own survey, I was able to add two new cases, namely from France
and Germany (material that was not available in English). For some countries (Israel,
Netherlands, Colombia), no standards were found in the previous report, and for that reason they
are not discussed here. In this report, the focus is on the extent to which the standards in non-
U.S. initiatives offer a sound basis for developing good practices for pre-university engineering
education. By “sound basis,” I mean that the standards are sufficiently clear and unambiguous
that teachers and curriculum developers can get a clear picture of what is expected of students.

In Section 2, I describe the standards in the various initiatives. This information is partially
copied from my previous report. In Section 3, I analyze the characteristics of those standards to
find directions for what good standards for pre-university engineering education should look
like. In this report, I do not pay much attention to the engineering content in the standards,
which was the focus of my previous report. Here I focus on aspects of the forms and structure of
the standards.

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