Is K-12 Engineering Doomed?
The tail winds
On nearly every front in education, the profile of engineering is rising. From learning standards to courses and extracurriculars to national tests, engineering is an increasingly prominent part of the landscape. And in colleges across the country, enrollments in engineering programs are ballooning. Against a backdrop of enduringly high STEM interest in society at large, engineering is on an extended roll.
The head winds
Except for this. As a new report from the National Academy of Engineering makes clear, the shine of engineering as an up-and-coming star in K-12 education might well be getting lost in a light-sucking black hole at the center — the daunting task of teaching engineering. The implications of the report, Building Capacity for Teaching Engineering in K-12 Education, raise a real question: might it actually be too hard to find, prepare, and support the teachers we need to deliver substantive engineering learning to K-12 students?
This new report from the NAE paints a detailed picture of the challenges to meet in making engineering a real part of K-12 learning.
Learning standards
The headline event in K-12 engineering from the last 10 years has been the development and widespread adoption of Next Generation Science Standards, or NGSS. These standards incorporate engineering design as a core element of science education at all levels of K-12 education. With engineering an explicit piece of what science teachers are expected to understand and teach, the impetus to train teachers and test students in engineering takes on much greater force.
Moreover, NGSS is not just a pie-in-the-sky policy formulation of what visionary researchers would prefer science education to look like. The standards have been adopted in toto by 20 states and the District of Columbia, and 24 other states have adapted NGSS to fit their particular educational environment. So a large majority of students in the country are currently learning science in schools where NGSS, and engineering-infused science education, is the rule.
School activities
Both formal and informal learning opportunities have proliferated in K-12 engineering. Recent releases of the National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education show that the number of high schools offering engineering courses of any kind has nearly doubled since 2012, rising from 24 percent to 46 percent. And schools with one or more engineering-related competition or club have increased notably, as well. From a third to half of all middle and high schools feature informal engineering learning activities, up from about a fifth of schools at this level. But the dramatic increases have registered at the elementary level, with the number of competitions doubling and clubs tripling, to the point that about 25 percent of all primary schools fall into this group.
For all the increased activity in schools to do with engineering, most kids are still learning a lot about the field from other sources.
National testing
Another indicator of national education trends is what federal policy makers choose to measure via the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. First in 2014 and again in 2018, the NAEP portfolio has included engineering via the NAEP Technology and Engineering Literacy (TEL) exam. Data collected with NAEP testing end up shaping national education trends as well as giving visibility to their subjects. NAEP TEL results have, for example, given even greater urgency to addressing gender gaps in engineering and technology, because girls have twice now outscored boys on the test. If we did not already understand we are squandering girls’ talents by explicitly and implicitly discouraging them from going into these fields, we should certainly get it by now.
Booming college numbers
Students, for their part, are voting with their feet on the question of engineering’s appeal and relevance to their interests. When they get a chance to choose their own course of study in college, they have been showing a strong predilection for the field: from 2008 to 2017, undergraduate enrollment in engineering increased by 54 percent, and bachelor’s degrees increased by 68 percent. And if a long-rumored Advanced Placement course in engineering does in fact get off the ground, even more students are likely to opt for engineering, entering college as they will be with actual engineering course credit in hand.
Bachelor’s degrees in engineering have nearly doubled since 2000, outpacing the rate of growth in other STEM fields.
Strong demand
All these factors suggest that K-12 engineering has many, varied cheerleaders: education researchers, federal and state policy makers, and students (and their families) at elementary, middle, and high school levels driving demand for the subject.
Weak supply
However, as the NAE report suggests, the supply side of K-12 engineering – the teachers of engineering required to meet demand – remains a tough nut. There are, most generally, five main reasons that building out a robust cadre of teachers of engineering poses such a stiff challenge:
We are starting with a very small number of teachers whose main focus is engineering. After an exhaustive review of varied sources of data about teacher supplies, the NAE authors conclude, “it is sobering that less than one-tenth of 1 percent of all K-12 teachers considered themselves to be teaching engineering as their main assignment” (58). In a population of some 1.5 million, this rate translates to about 2,000 teachers. Most K-12 engineering content is being taught by teachers with, at best, a partial grasp of the field.
Current teacher training programs do not have the capacity to raise this number. The primary source of teachers with the potential to teach engineering is technology education programs; in the last 10 years, the total number of these programs has dropped from 190 to 41, graduating about 200 students in 2017. Few engineering teacher programs exist, and those that do operate on a scale far too small to fill the channel.
It is not clear what prospective teachers of engineering should be taught. Both the subject matter and pedagogies suitable for desirable learning outcomes remain largely unexplored topics of educational research. Two research journals exist for publicizing research in this area, and federal funding for the topic has dissipated in recent years.
Without an established research base, schools of education cannot scale up teacher training programs to meet the needs of K-12 schools to teach engineering. In science education at large, “most teacher preparation programs have not adjusted their curricula to incorporate engineering” (65).
Resistance to engineering content in the field of science education is widespread. Even if learning standards in NGSS call for connecting engineering to science education, there is “little evidence that current science teachers are doing so” (77).
In summary, the demand side for K-12 engineering – learning standards, student interest, national and state policies, employment prospects – is strong, and if anything, getting stronger. The supply side – content and technique for teaching, people to do the teaching – is weak, being fed in trickles and driblets.
What to do?
The NAE report identifies four goals for K-12 engineering:
Develop engineering literacy.
Improve math and science learning by integrating engineering into STEM.
Improve college and career readiness.
Prepare students for post-secondary engineering studies.
Each goal seems to apply to successively smaller numbers of students; “literacy” should certainly be within reach of the 3.7 million student who graduate from high school every spring, while only about 150,000 will go on to engineering studies in college the following fall.
Market pressures
Education works in many of the same ways that markets do, remaking itself in response to evolving demands. So a solution to the engineering teacher problem should include measures to continue building the demand side, increasing the numbers of students interested in and prepared for engineering learning experiences at school. The more, and more urgently, students and families, post-secondary institutions, and stakeholders in industry and government ask for engineering to become a bigger part of K-12 education, the more schools, science educators, and teacher training programs will have to respond.
And signs from this side of the equation do indicate change can happen: new standards under review for accrediting science teacher training programs include NGSS-aligned engineering content. Developing and embedding this content within colleges of education will take time, but the standards make clear what the future needs to look like.
How to be an engineering “Keynesian”
For now and into the future, though, stakeholders can probably do most to increase demand for K-12 engineering by working to develop engineering literacy. It is the easiest arena of activity to enter, requiring the least technical knowledge and offering readily available resources. Engineering literacy activities can also reach the largest numbers of students.
Our demand-side resources
Our four K-12 engineering books are designed expressly towards the goal of developing engineering literacy. They showcase the field in relevant, engaging ways to all levels of K-12 students, and include both content and learning activities readymade for educators – formal and informal, inside or outside the classroom – with no background in the field. Explore them on our website, and if you’d like to see a digital sample, just be in touch. And if you’ve read this far, you can take 10% off the cover price of any book by using the discount code 10FORYOU.
And, finally
How do you think we should solve the engineering teacher training problem? Have you seen any approaches that could scale up to help meet demand? Be in touch with any ideas. And we always appreciate your willingness to share us with interested friends or colleagues.
Eric Iversen is VP for Learning and Communications at Start Engineering. He has written and spoken widely on STEM education and related careers. You can write to him about this topic, especially when he gets stuff wrong, at eiversen@start-engineering.com.
You can also follow along on Twitter @StartEnginNow.
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