Elementary Engineering Student Interests and Attitudes:
A Comparison across Treatments
As part of a large-scale efficacy study of an elementary engineering curriculum, we collected post-surveys of students’ interests in and attitudes towards engineering. Over two years, we collected almost 14,000 surveys from students in grades 3, 4, and 5 who participated in one of two engineering curricula, the treatment and comparison curriculum. We recruited teacher volunteers for this study through their principals and superintendents. Teachers applied to participate as teams of teachers from the same school. Once accepted, we randomized at the school level into the treatment or comparison group.
The treatment curriculum is designed from a social constructivist theoretical framework, taking as given that students learn deeply through meaningful engagement in a discipline at a developmentally appropriate level (Sawyer, 2006). The treatment curriculum meets the criteria for project-based learning (PBL), where students focus on a main design challenge which engages them with key ideas in science and engineering. In the treatment, the central project is open-ended, students are engaged in the problem with a realistic context, and heavy scaffolding is provided to engage in engineering practices and reasoning. The comparison curriculum also includes hands-on challenges, but in contrast, the challenges are not motivated with a context, scaffolding is not provided, many challenges are not open-ended, and information is given through direct instruction.
Students were asked to rate their interest and attitudes as compared to the summer before. The survey was developed from earlier research by the authors, as well as from surveys of science attitudes reported in the literature (Germann, 1988; Lichtenstein et al., 2008; Owen et al., 2008; Weinburgh & Steele, 2000). We will report on the development and testing of the survey, including validity evidence, in the final paper. We will also report on our methods of analysis and results, looking at differences between the treatment groups as well as the moderating effect of student demographics.
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Weinburgh, M. H., & Steele, D. (2000). The Modified Attitudes toward Science Inventory: Developing an Instrument to Be Used with Fifth Grade Urban Students. Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, 6(1), 87–94.
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