Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data

The cultural origins of human cognition

The conditions of learning

The global urgency to improve STEM education may be driven by environmental and social impacts of the twenty-first century which in turn jeopardizes global security and economic stability. The complexity of these global factors reach beyond just helping students achieve high scores in math and science assessments. Friedman (The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century, 2005) helped illustrate the complexity of a global society, and educators must help students prepare for this global shift. In response to these challenges, the USA experienced massive STEM educational reforms in the last two decades. In practice, STEM educators lack cohesive understanding of STEM education. Therefore, they could benefit from a STEM education conceptual framework. The process of integrating science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in authentic contexts can be as complex as the global challenges that demand a new generation of STEM experts. Educational researchers indicate that teachers struggle to make connections across the STEM disciplines. Consequently, students are often disinterested in science and math when they learn in an isolated and disjoined manner missing connections to crosscutting concepts and real-world applications. The following paper will operationalize STEM education key concepts and blend learning theories to build an integrated STEM education framework to assist in further researching integrated STEM education.

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A conceptual framework for integrated STEM education

Eager to Learn: Educating Our Preschoolers

The study presented here focuses on the development of an early education Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) curriculum with emphasis on engineering. This article presents the teacher's experience as she undertook the task of familiarising herself with the new content and using the curriculum in a university based lab-school classroom in the US. More specifically, the article describes and analyses the collaboration between the teacher and the curriculum developer. It also presents facilitators and barriers during the implementation, as identified by the teacher and the researchers, reports on the multiple stakeholders involved, and raises questions for future research. Engineering education in the precollege years is a developing academic discipline that stems from the need to understand and improve the ways engineers are formally educated. The belief of early experiences as determinants of later experiences has long constituted a basis of educational planning. Therefore, identifying...

Engineering curriculum in the preschool classroom: the teacher's experience

The newly formed discipline of engineering education is addressing the need to (a) enhance STEM education for precollege students and (b) identify optimum ways to introduce engineering content starting, perhaps, from the early ages. Introducing engineering at the Prekindergarten through 12th grade (PreK-12) education level requires significant changes in teacher preparation and support. It highlights the need for developing developmentally appropriate content knowledge and pedagogical methods, thus revealing the challenges of preparing teachers to incorporate this type of knowledge base into their practice. Although professional development offered by universities, school districts, and other educational entities provides the primary source of formal learning tools for teachers, an increasing number of teachers also utilize other informal web-based resources regularly. This paper examines available PreK-12 engineering web resources offered by entities formally related to education in seven different languages, namely Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), English, French, Greek, Korean, and Spanish. Findings showed how different educational systems designated different attention to the entry level ages when introducing engineering content. Differences in the terminology used to identify STEM resources for introducing these topics also became apparent. Similarities suggest that a large number of resources available on the web were originating in all researched languages. However, the developmental appropriateness and content validity of many of these resources remained questionable in many cases. In general, there was a plethora of isolated activities and lesson plans but significantly fewer complete engineering curricula available to teachers on the web. This study presents a comparative analysis of the international landscape of PreK-12 engineering education and provides guidelines and samples of state-of-the art resources in each language for teachers interested in introducing their students to engineering as a reliable starting point towards PreK-12 engineering information gathering.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186%2Fs40594-014-0015-3.pdf

The landscape of PreK-12 engineering online resources for teachers: global trends

National debate about K-12 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education has given rise to questions about appropriate materials for engineering education from prekindergarten through grade 12 Introducing engineering in the early years entails recognition of the need for teachers to understand its content and poses the challenge of preparing teachers to incorporate engineering education into their practice Teacher preparation has historically included seeking information in books, journals, and magazines, and the professional development offered by universities, school districts, and other educational entities continues to provide the majority of formal options accessed by teachers However, the advent of the Internet has expanded the ways that teachers undertake professional development and how they prepare to present new content An online search for open source preschool through grade 12 (P-12) engineering materials revealed a wide variety of Web sites and online documents that included curricula, lesson plans, and descriptions of activities Narrowing the search to the P-3 level revealed that the pedagogically and content-reliable sources available are limited in number and may be difficult to identify among the plethora of information This study begins to describe the current landscape of open-access Internet materials in the field of early STEM with emphasis on engineering The authors offer a guide-in-progress for selecting material for teachers and parents interested in introducing their young children to engineering The authors also address emerging pedagogical fidelity and engineering content issues

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Engineering Curricula in Early Education: Describing the Landscape of Open Resources.

Children's free play naturally enhances skills of observation, communication, experimentation, as well as development of rationale and construction skills. These domains, while synthesised, can lead to the development of certain process models regarding the way constructions could be designed, built and improved. The Design Process model constitutes a core concept of engineering. Blocks seem to be one of the best tools to use in order to work towards the development of such a model. This is a qualitative observational study in preschoolers’ free playing with blocks. Eighteen children aged three- to five-years-old were observed and videotaped for four months to examine whether young children can demonstrate instances of precursors to engineering behaviour while building, by demonstrating similarities to the Design Process. Analysis of the video data showed that children demonstrated and articulated goal-oriented design, problem-solving thinking, innovation stemming out of synthesis of multiple designs, pat...

Practicing engineering while building with blocks: identifying engineering thinking

探究性学习被视为早期教育中的发展适宜性的教育实践。在探究过程中,接 触新事物能引导儿童获取知识,幼儿与一些熟悉的和不熟悉的人工制品之间的互 动能够促进他们发展的整合。探索性活动能够在任何时间自发地發生,也可以通 过设计一些有计划的活动来达到特定的课程和发展目标。本文探索了学前儿童在 不同的三种情景中的半结构探索性活动中的互动情况。来自6个不同班级的35名 4-5岁儿童被随机分到三种不同的情景中。每种情景都包括同样的13种物品,但 这些物品以不同的方式呈现,一种是在白纸上用黑色墨水画出的草图(图纸情 景),一种是儿童故事书(图书情景),一种是实物本身(实物情景)。对幼儿 在这三种情景中的探索和互动行为进行了录像,并以此分析哪种情景更能刺激和 鼓励儿童的早期工程思维。我们假设实物情景可能是最有效的。最终的结果表明, 幼儿在实物情景中讨论和互动的时间最长,而且在实物情景中,幼儿對实物的功 能用途表现出有更多的知识。至于某一特定物品或某种情景是否能够更加激发幼 儿的兴趣,三种情景都没有表现出明确的规律。最后,本文讨论了幼儿科学、技 术、工程、数学和儿童发展所带来的启示。

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Aikaterini Bagiati

Papers

Engineering curriculum in the preschool classroom: the teacher's experience

The landscape of PreK-12 engineering online resources for teachers: global trends

Engineering Curricula in Early Education: Describing the Landscape of Open Resources.

Practicing engineering while building with blocks: identifying engineering thinking

Talking about Artifacts: Preschool Children's Explorations with Sketches, Stories, and Tangible Objects.