WSU researchers seek to spark youth interest in engineering

WSU researcher Denny Davis and colleagues have been awarded a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation that seeks to improve student interest in math in secondary grades and better understand the factors affecting student interest in engineering and science careers.

These questions have become of increasing importance in the last few years as the number of American students entering engineering has stagnated. Leaders in industry and academics are increasingly concerned that without maintaining interest and competitiveness in the hard sciences, mathematics and engineering, the U.S. will lose its leading edge in the global marketplace.

Through the recently established Engineering Education Research Center, the researchers in the College of Engineering and Architecture and the College of Education will work with area high school math teachers to develop curriculum materials that illustrate exciting engineering applications relevant to students’ lives. The hope is that the program, entitled Culturally-Relevant Engineering Applications in Mathematics, will increase student interest in engineering at the same time that it increases math literacy.

The program will bring together graduate students from engineering and math who will work in conjunction with a high school teacher in a classroom for an entire school year. The researchers hope that the students will leave high school more math-ready, but also thinking about engineering as a career choice, Davis said.

“Math teachers don’t have the time to develop these curriculum materials,” Davis said. “We have to be in there working with them.”

Working with diverse groups of teachers and students from Pullman, Pasco and Omak high schools, the researchers want to encourage involvement in engineering and math from underrepresented groups of students. Giving science, math and engineering graduate students’ exposure to the K-12 school system will also perhaps influence some to a future career in secondary or higher education.

There will also be a distance learning component. Through the development of curriculum models, the project will provide a resource to the K-12 math and science teachers. Long-term relationships will be established between

K-12 teachers and university faculty to support effective math teaching and the promotion of engineering careers at both the K-12 and university levels. Videoconferencing will be used to connect the schools with one another and with the university to strengthen the established relationships.

The program will be assessed to determine its success rate. The College of Education and the College of Engineering and Architecture established the Engineering Education Research Center in Jan. 2005, with shared leadership from faculty from both colleges. Davis and Gerald Maring, of the College of Education, are co-directors. The center was created to address growing concerns in the U.S. about fewer students entering the field of engineering, the preparation of engineers for a global economy and the diversity of the engineering.

The center is striving to empower educators along the engineering pipeline to work more effectively. It facilitates research collaboration to address major challenges faced by educators, while also building a community of educators working together on these issues.

In addition to Davis and Maring, the project team for the grant includes: Sandra Cooper Mathematics (mathematics education), Guy Westhoff – Teaching and Learning (technology), Jennifer Beller – Assessment and Evaluation (project assessment) and Janae Landis Math Engineering Science Achievement (MESA curriculum).