Engineering Challenges Faced by Elementary Education Majors
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The Symposium provides undergraduates from all academic disciplines with an opportunity to share their research with the university community and other guests through conference-style oral presentations. The Symposium represents part of a larger effort of Iowa State University to enhance, support, and celebrate undergraduate research activity.
Though coordinated by the University Honors Program, all undergraduate students are eligible and encouraged to participate in the Symposium. Undergraduates conducting research but not yet ready to present their work are encouraged to attend the Symposium to learn about the presentation process and students not currently involved in research are encouraged to attend the Symposium to learn about the broad range of undergraduate research activities that are taking place at ISU.
The first Symposium was held in April 2007. The 39 students who presented research and their mentors collectively represented all of ISU's Colleges: Agriculture and Life Sciences, Business, Design, Engineering, Human Sciences, Liberal Arts and Sciences, Veterinary Medicine, and the Graduate College. The event has grown to regularly include more than 100 students presenting on topics that span the broad range of disciplines studied at ISU.
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Abstract
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.