Asee peer logo

Middle School Teachers’ Use And Development Of Engineering Subject Matter Knowledge

Download Paper |

Conference

2010 Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Louisville, Kentucky

Publication Date

June 20, 2010

Start Date

June 20, 2010

End Date

June 23, 2010

ISSN

2153-5965

Conference Session

New Learning Paradigms II

Tagged Division

Educational Research and Methods

Page Count

24

Page Numbers

15.873.1 - 15.873.24

DOI

10.18260/1-2--15927

Permanent URL

https://strategy.asee.org/15927

Download Count

491

Request a correction

Paper Authors

author page

Morgan Hynes Tufts University

author page

David Crismond The City College of New York

author page

Barbara Brizuela Tufts University

Download Paper |

Abstract
NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract

Middle-School Teachers’ Use And Development Of Engineering Subject Matter Knowledge: Analysis of Three Cases

Abstract

This paper reports on a portion of a study of three middle school teachers (two mathematics teachers and one science teacher) as they taught a unit of engineering instruction. The study investigated the subject matter and pedagogical content knowledge these teachers used and developed as they taught with materials that used LEGO to introduce students to the engineering design process while designing and building a computer-controlled assistive device that utilizes motors and sensors. This paper focuses and reports on the subject matter knowledge the teachers learned and used, including a subject new to them—engineering, based on teacher interviews and classroom observations. The data revealed how a teacher’s knowledge of physics or engineering impacted their teaching, and that the teachers rarely connected their mathematics or science knowledge to make connections to engineering explicitly. One conjecture made from the data collected during the study is that teachers would benefit from focused opportunities to develop the different specific types of engineering knowledge that they struggle with the most (i.e., concepts in physics, mathematics, programming and engineering design).

Hynes, M., & Crismond, D., & Brizuela, B. (2010, June), Middle School Teachers’ Use And Development Of Engineering Subject Matter Knowledge Paper presented at 2010 Annual Conference & Exposition, Louisville, Kentucky. 10.18260/1-2--15927

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2010 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015