Making Animal-Inspired Robots With Fifth and Sixth Graders: Introducing Engineering in Preservice Teacher Education
Jennifer M. Kidd · Proceedings of the 2019 AERA Annual Meeting · 2019
Making Animal-inspired Robots with Fifth and Sixth Graders: Introducing Engineering in Pre-service Teacher Education PurposeElementary schools are increasingly embracing STEM education.The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) call for the engineering design process to be emphasized as much as scientific investigation and for students to begin learning about it in kindergarten (NGSS Lead States, 2013).Meanwhile, Virginia became the first state to require computer science education when it adopted the K-12 Computer Science Standards of Learning in 2017(Sawchuck, 2017) .The mandatory standards, emphasizing computational thinking and coding, were designed for integration at the K-8 level.Other states are following suit to establish similar standards (Neary, 2016;Stanton et al, 2017).Despite these efforts, many young students are still not introduced to engineering in schools (Bybee, 2010;Carr, Bennett & Strobel, 2012).One reason for this is teachers' lack of familiarity with engineering and lack of confidence in the underlying disciplines of mathematics and science (Hsu, Purzer & Cardella, 2011).Hsu et al. (2011) found that elementary school teachers believed that it was important to incorporate engineering into their curricula, but did not feel confident teaching it.Most pre-service teachers (PSTs), especially those pursuing licensure in elementary education, are not exposed to engineering/computing in their coursework.As of Spring 2017, only nine higher education programs in the US provided courses or curricular programs for elementary education majors to develop content knowledge in technology and engineering (Rose, Carter, Brown, & Shumway, 2017).This dearth of instruction in engineering and computer science conflicts with prior research suggesting that P-6 PSTs must receive training in engineering topics, feel confident in their abilities to teach them, and be willing to adopt new teaching practices, to integrate engineering into their classrooms (Rich, Jones, Belikov, Yoshikawa, & Perkins, 2017).If Virginia's teachers are to feel confident teaching engineering and computer science, they will need experience doing so.Thus, it is crucial to develop teacher preparation programs capable of equipping teachers with the necessary knowledge and skills in teaching these topics (Grover & Pea, 2013).In Spring 2018, an education faculty member partnered with an engineering professor to introduce PSTs to engineering and programming within the context of an educational technology course, T430.Enrolled students met at a local school alongside 5th and 6th graders (FSGs) who were recruited for an after-school technology club.Over the course of ten weeks, PSTs and FSGs explored technologies for creation and collaboration and completed programming activities that culminated in the creation of animal-inspired robots.The overall goal was to enhance PSTs' engineering knowledge, beliefs, and self-efficacy, coding self-efficacy, and intention to integrate engineering into their instruction. PerspectivesBandura's social cognitive theory (1993) suggests that self-efficacy, " people's beliefs about their capabilities" (p.118), is developed from social experiences and self-perception, and is influential in determining outcomes.People with high self-efficacy are more likely to view difficult tasks as something to be mastered rather than something to be avoided, which, in turn, leads to higher levels of performance.Self-efficacy is believed to be context specific and associated with a particular task (Tschannen-Moran & McMaster, 2009).Content knowledge (Swackhamer, Koellner, Basile & Kimbrough, 2009) and belief in a subject's importance (Hsu et al., 2011;Yasar et al., 2006) contribute to teacher self-efficacy, which has