COLLEGE PARK, MD (November, 2013) In the United States, the demand for engineers exceeds the supply, and one reason for this is that engineering is not well promoted in our education system. Dr. Leigh Abts, research associate professor with a joint appointment in the College of Education and the A. James Clark School of Engineering, is working to fix this problem.
A recent Discover article titled E is for Engineering describes the national push for growing the K-12 STEM pipeline by infusing an increased focus on engineering and hands-on problem solving in the nations K-20 classrooms and highlights Dr. Abtss contribution to this effort. Abts, an engineer by training with research interests in curriculum development, is integrating the engineering design process into new curriculum at UMD as well as developing a visionary, interactive Advanced Placement (AP) assessment in engineering for high school students.
Dr. Abts notes that since engineering rarely appears in primary and secondary curricula, students are less likely to pursue engineering majors in college. A mere 8 percent of incoming freshmen choose to major in engineering, and of those, only half will earn a degree in the field. Fixing this leaky engineering talent pipeline is one aim of the Next Generation Science Standards, newly released from a national coalition of science educators, which seek to integrate engineering ideas into math and language arts classes and help students apply engineering skills to real-world scenarios.
The Universitys Energy 101 curriculum, co-developed by Dr. Abts and bioengineering professor Dr. Idalis Villanueva, challenges students to systematically explore the science and social science issues behind sound energy decision-making and to apply their knowledge to workplace and personal decisions. In the class, students identify an energy-related problem and design a solution for it based on their interests and expertise. The course helps students think and learn the way engineers do creatively, critically, and collaboratively emphasizing the design process.
Because the design process is critical to engineering, seeing how students approach problems to find workable solutions is more important than merely measuring their grasp of the subject matter. For this reason, Dr. Abts explains, engineering skills cannot be assessed properly with multiple-choice tests. For the past eight years, Dr. Abts has been developing a new assessment tool for an AP Engineering exam. Dr. Abtss AP assessment uses online portfolios where students visually demonstrate a design challenge and their problem-solving process from idea to prototype to solution. For example, asking how a hiker can hobble to safety if she injures herself far from help, a group of high school students invented a trekking pole which doubles as a crutch.
The College Boards approval for Dr. Abtss AP assessment is still pending, but already the beta version of the portfolio submission site, called the Innovation Portal, is up and running, with 12,000 registered users consisting of both high-school and college students. Dr. Abts is also working with the Department of Defense on plans to implement the portfolio in engineering courses aimed at helping returning servicemen and women transition their skills into the civilian workforce. He describes the Innovation Portal as a tool for instructors and students to work through the design process together. Since the new science standards emphasize the need for more hands-on problem-solving projects in STEM courses, he anticipates that such an interactive resource will become an increasingly useful tool in the future.
Dr. Leigh Abts is a research associate professor with a joint appointment in the College of Educations Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership and in the A. James Clark School of Engineerings Fischell Department of Bioengineering.
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