Engineering Challenges Faced by Elementary Education Majors

Abstract

<p>Our research investigates the Toying with Technology class at Iowa State University to learn how Elementary Education majors understand and grow in their ability to teach engineering concepts. This class is a required course in order to obtain the math endorsement and the Learning Technologies minor for Elementary Education majors. The purpose of this study is to look at the challenges and impacts faced by the students in the course. Our hypothesis is that Elementary Education majors face challenges when learning engineering concepts. Our primary sources of information will be qualitative data from the interviews conducted toward the beginning and end of the class along with talking with the professor and his Teaching Assistants about their observations. Our analysis of these interview responses was done as a research group and we compared each transcribed interview with the use of categorical matrices to have a systematic understanding of the students’ attitudes. From this analysis, we will talk with the professor about possibly changing some material in the course to better suit the students and we will also publish a research paper sharing our work with the world to help other groups doing similar research.</p>