Browsing by Subject "STEM education"
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Item Alumnae reflections : the impact of early exposure, a sense of belonging in the major and connection to engineering(2013-12) Denyszyn, Jodi Lynn; Reddick, Richard, 1972-Despite efforts to increase female participation in STEM majors, women continue to be an underrepresented population in this domain, impacting the U.S. workforce. Researchers have identified a variety of factors that benefit engineering students without regard to gender (mentoring; student-faculty interactions; co-curricular involvement) but research is limited on how female engineering students foster a sense of belonging to the engineering major helping them persist through to graduation. Negative factors like gender bias or stereotyping are detailed in extant literature. Research needs to identify ways that contribute to female engineering connection and sense of belonging in engineering, not solely focus on the factors that negatively impact female engineering student trajectories. In an effort to address this gap in the literature, interviews with alumnae who graduated from engineering colleges across the U.S. were conducted. Data from this study provides a glimpse into what helped foster successful navigation through engineering majors for alumnae. Expanding current female and STEM literature, participants provide insights on pre-college, college, and on career influences.Item Antenna design challenge(2014-08) Ham, Hubert K.; Ling, Hao; Riegle-Crumb, CatherineIn today's new and changing world, Science, Technology, Engineering, Math (STEM) education has come to the forefront of educational reform. The expectation for better prepared workers for today's technology infused businesses requires a better trained student, not only at the post-secondary level, but also at the secondary level. Today's student has access to technology that could have only been dreamed of 60 years ago. With this need for higher level skills in the STEM field for the work force, it would only be logical to expose students to aspects of engineering in younger grades, particularly at the high school level. The Antenna Design challenge has been designed to expose students to the engineering process and technology that is relevant to their everyday lives. This report will examine how an engineering challenge can be incorporated into the physics classroom, while observing how different levels of scaffolding affect mastery of the material and implementation of the lesson.Item Combining systems thinking, model-based reasoning, and project-based learning to advance student agency, increase student engagement and understanding, and provide an authentic and accurate method of assessing student competencies in a high school aquatic science course(2013-08) Ryan, Douglas Wayne; Stroup, Walter M.; Petrosino, Anthony JScience elective courses for high school seniors provide an opportunity to engage students in rigorous, relevant instruction that requires students to employ a broad range of science knowledge and skills from previous courses toward real world problems with relevance to students’ current and future life experiences. The goal of this work is to provide teachers of high school science courses with a methodology for the introduction of strong STEM components into traditional science courses, particularly model eliciting activities, system dynamics, and engineering based design challenges. Employing these instructional methods in an aquatic science course produced an effective, engaging curriculum that increased students understanding of science content and provided students with the tools to analyze, evaluate and design solutions to real world problems. Teaching the concept of system dynamics early in the course gave students tools, including causal loop diagrams, to create useful models for analyzing interactions in complex systems. Student creation of such models proved an effective instructional method for teaching science content and the nature of scientific processes. Students displayed the ability to apply these techniques, once taught, to a diverse set of problems and expressed an intention to continue to use these skills both personally and professionally in the future. Having students create, analyze, and discuss their own models of complex systems provided the teacher with an effective method for both formative and summative assessment of student knowledge and comprehension. The models provided a more authentic and accurate evaluation of student knowledge and understanding than a written test or multiple choice response exam alone. Student use of software modeling tools, such as STELLA, can be added to these methods, providing students with the ability to add the concepts of rate and flow to their models.Item Engineering design process : creating and 3D printing a mechanical toy(2016-05) Garcia, Carmen Matilde; Crawford, Richard H.; Marshall, Jill Ann; Petrosino, AnthonyThis report describes an activity that explores the Engineering Design Process through a research-based module intended to be implemented in a grade 9-12 science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) classroom. Moreover, this study serves as a demonstration of the module’s effectiveness in guiding end users through the Engineering Design Process using computer aided design (CAD) software, to design and fabricate a fully working 3D printed mechanical toy. The hypothesis of the research is that usage of the module makes an impact on students’ proficiency with and understanding of the Engineering Design Process. Of the students enrolled in the Engineering Design and Presentation class (n=38) at the Brownsville Early College High School, a random sample (n=12) was selected for data collection purposes. Results showed that using the module increases students’ understanding of and proficiency with the Engineering Design Process and Autodesk Inventor. Finally, this paper provides insights on future modifications of the module that could lead to a better learning tool for STEM education.Item Incorporating engineering in high school biology(2014-08) Nusz, Jarred Ross; Ren, PengyuThe purpose of this project was to create a series of lessons that incorporate both Biology and Engineering concepts. The three lessons were intended to increase in complexity as the students progress throughout the year. Using PyMol software allowed students to visually represent complex protein structures while introducing and providing an opportunity to practice programming. Each lesson was followed by a worksheet or activity to aid in students' comprehension and application of practice. These lessons were designed to maximize students' time learning to program and using PyMol software while enhancing the current curriculum. Lesson one introduced students to the PyMol software while building and representing the four main structures of proteins. With increased programming knowledge, lesson two focused on modeling the DNA double helix. The final lesson introduced students to evolutionary relationships based on a protein's amino acid sequence.Item Incorporating engineering specificity in the UTeach Observation Protocol(2014-08) Martin, Spencer Holmes; Marshall, Jill AnnThe UTeach Observation Protocol (UTOP) is designed to capture what occurs in a classroom. The UTOP was developed for use in the nationally recognized UTeach program (uteach.utexas.edu) and has been validated nationally in the Gates Foundation Measures of Effective Teaching. (http://www.metproject.org/downloads/Preliminary_Findings-Research_Paper.pdf) Currently the UTOP has been used in both science and math classrooms and is being developed for use in English language arts and social studies classrooms as well. This report serves to begin the modification of the UTOP for use in an engineering classroom to evaluate engineering specific content. The UTOP has been described as a lens for reflection on teaching practices and the goal of this report is to help focus that lens more clearly on the engineering classroom. This tool was created for utilization in both educator and administrator roles. Teachers can use the UTOP to self-assess their own teaching practices as well as in observing other teachers and identify classroom best practices. Administrators and other classroom visitors can use the UTOP to understand and evaluate what occurs in a classroom for a multitude of outcomes. The methodology chosen in this report to create the engineering specific examples used real lessons that have been implemented in engineering classrooms and vetted in actual practice. Using both initial lessons from the teachers and their feedback along with language taken from the Next Generation Science Standard Framework and the UTeachEngineering Engineering Design Protocol, the examples were developed to show how to score each indicator on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest score, in a secondary engineering classroom. The next steps recommended for this work are to pilot the examples created in this report and test the usefulness of the examples created. This can be accomplished by field-testing it in UTOP training with teachers and modifying the information based on the feedback that they provide. The work described in this paper was made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation (Award DUE-0831811).Item Modeling Successful Inclusive STEM High Schools: An Analysis of Students? College Entry Indicators in Texas(2014-07-29) Erdogan, NiyaziThis dissertation highlights a conceptual framework for specialized Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) schools and the college readiness of Inclusive STEM High School graduates in comparison to traditional high school graduates. In reviewing the literature, I found the current perception for specialized STEM schools can be described as unique environments including advanced curriculum, expert teachers, and opportunities for internships and immersion. Finding from the studies exploring college and career readiness of students attending these schools revealed students from specialized STEM schools are performing slightly better on high-stake mathematics and science tests in comparison with students in traditional schools. Studies also showed students from specialized STEM schools are more interested in STEM, more willing to attend classes, more likely to pass state tests, and more likely to earn college degrees. After synthesizing the literature, I created a conceptual framework of effective learning environments for specialized STEM schools using an ecology metaphor. In answering the research questions related to success of students attending either T-STEM or traditional schools, I concluded success on reading, mathematics, science high-stake tests for students does not differ by school type. However, student demographic variables (i.e., gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and special education status) may influence success of students attending T-STEM schools. For example, results revealed statistical significance between male, Hispanic, White, and economically disadvantaged students from T-STEM and traditional schools on reading, mathematics, and science scores. In answering the research question related to success of T-STEM in comparison with traditional schools, I found no statistical significance in measures of schools? success. However, regardless of school type, female students performed better on reading scores whereas male students performed better on mathematics and science scores. In addition, White and Asian students outperformed all other ethnic groups on performance measures. Also, economically disadvantaged students and students in special education program were outperformed by students not identified as disadvantaged or learning disabled. On school level indicators, regardless of school type, dropout rate negatively associated with students? reading, mathematics, and science scores. In addition, percentage of students taking AP/IB end of course exam had a positive association with reading, mathematics, and science scores. Finally, percentage of students taking SAT/ACT also demonstrated a positive association with reading and mathematics scores, but not science scores. In conclusion, specialized STEM schools can be the solution to the problem of shortages in the STEM workforce; however, there still work remains.Item The Impact of STEM PBL Teacher Professional Development on Student Mathematics Achievement in High Schools(2013-05-20) Han, Sun YoungThis dissertation consists of three articles that explore the effect of professional development (PD) on teachers? understanding and implementation of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) project based learning (PBL), and the effect of STEM PBL on students? mathematics achievement. Teachers in three high schools participated in the research activities. They attended sustained PDs provided by one STEM center based in a Southwestern university, and were required to implement STEM PBLs once every six-weeks for three years (2008 through 2010). The first article employed a mixed-method case study to explore the relation between the quality of the teachers? in-class STEM PBL implementations, understanding of the PBL in STEM education, and attendance in the STEM PBL activities. Quantitative findings indicate that attendance in the PD activities was significantly correlated with the quality of the in-class PBL implementation in 2010, yet not in 2011. Moreover, qualitative findings show that the teachers viewed the STEM PBL pedagogy as a means to promote student interest in mathematics, cultivate the interdisciplinary research culture in K-12 classrooms, and help improve students? content understanding. The second article investigated the effect of STEM PBL, especially on Hispanic and at-risk students? mathematics achievement. The participants were 528 students in the three STEM PBL high schools and 2,688 students in non-STEM PBL schools in the same region. Latent growth modeling was used to analyze the repeated measures across years. STEM PBL instruction positively influenced Hispanic students? achievement in mathematics, but not at-risk students. The third study investigated whether participating in STEM PBL activities affected students who had varied performance levels, and to what extent students? individual factors influenced their mathematics achievement. The participants were 836 high school students in the three schools. The findings from the hierarchical linear modeling showed that low performing students showed statistically significantly higher growth rates on mathematics scores than high and middle performing students, over the three years. In addition, student?s ethnicity and economic status were good predictors of academic achievement. This dissertation is the first to reveal the effect of STEM PBL on student academic achievement relating to inservice teacher PD by employing the sophisticated research methodology.Item A woman’s venture into engineering and implications for high school curriculum(2014-08) McBride, Andrea Lea; Crawford, Richard H.Mobile technology is changing the way we communicate and programmers are needed to turn a companies’ ideas into reality. This report describes the design decisions and programming details involved in developing a novel iPhone app for the medical industry. In the process, the report examines how women succeed in a male-dominated sector of engineering – software development – and explores how to encourage high school students to take an interest in software engineering as a possible career.