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A Survey of Utah's Public Secondary Education Science Teachers to Determine Their Preparedness to Teach Engineering Design

Education is always changing and science education is no exception, with many influential publications passing through science education over the years. The latest wave in science standards is called the Next Generation Science Standards. The Next Generation Science Standards are anticipated to have a significant effect on state science standards around the entire country. One thing about these new standards is very different from all previous science standards—they include the principle of engineering design in them.
Asking science teachers to teach engineering design is asking them to teach a principle for which their teaching licensure would not have formally prepared them. Consequently, the hypothesis of this study was that the feeling of preparedness to teach engineering design would be low among public secondary education Utah science teachers. This study shows that hypothesis to be correct: Utah science teachers do not feel prepared to teach engineering design. The feelings of teacher preparedness can be improved through professional development and inclusion of engineering design into science teacher education programs. It should be infused into these arenas now that teachers have indicated their low feelings of preparedness. More teacher preparation should be sought because an unprepared teacher will not prepare students as well as a prepared teacher. And, creating prepared students is the goal of the education system.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UTAHS/oai:digitalcommons.usu.edu:etd-4572
Date01 May 2014
CreatorsAmes, Roland Tyler
PublisherDigitalCommons@USU
Source SetsUtah State University
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceAll Graduate Theses and Dissertations
RightsCopyright for this work is held by the author. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners. Works not in the public domain cannot be commercially exploited without permission of the copyright owner. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user. For more information contact Andrew Wesolek (andrew.wesolek@usu.edu).

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