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Utah State University is one of nine universities that have been awarded a total $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation to create a center for learning and teaching of technology education.
The College of Engineering is the recipient of the grant, which will span over the next five years, to start a National Science Foundation Center for Learning and Teaching, USU President Kermit L. Hall said.
The center will create a community of university professors and K-12 teachers who can help students learn about engineering and technology concepts. The center is focused on preparing technology education teachers and researching how students learn technology concepts, said Christine Hailey, associate dean of the College of Engineering.
Nationwide, experienced university educators are retiring and being replaced with inadequately prepared teachers, Maren Cartwright, a science & engineering public relations specialist, said. NSF awards two of these grants a year, Hailey said, and the grant will give USU access to a broader community being one of the collaborators in the program.
“It greatly improves USU’s prestige in terms of being a credible research institution for engineering education and technology ed. education,” Hailey said.
The center will help to create more educated teachers in teaching technology and engineering education in universities and K-12 schools.
“It puts us in a position of national leadership with regard to the development of instructional routines and techniques,” Hall said, “and especially keeping students in engineering programs.”
The dropout rate for engineering students nationally is about 40 percent, Hall said.
Jared Bench, a senior in electrical engineering, said the course load and math requirements for most engineering students is fairly difficult.
The transition for students from high school to college engineering programs is difficult, Hailey said, because most students do not understand the applications of the courses to career options. The center will hopefully bridge science and math so when students come to USU they have a better understanding of the material, Hailey said, not just the concepts.
“I think if we understand, ‘what can we use these concepts for’, we learn it better,” Hailey said.
The center’s goal is to help in a more “creative, innovative, interesting way to press the teaching envelope so more students will get over that hump” Hall said – the “hump” referring to the difficulty of high school students making the transition to engineering courses.
“Especially in engineering, the math gets a lot trickier.” Bench said, “For me, one of the bridges that I had to gap was going from the math theory to what I can apply it in engineering.”
One of the goals of USU is to expand the engineering population, Hall said.
“Students who are admitted into the engineering program come on a higher level of preparedness and they help the overall profile of the university,” Hall said, “but they also help to create a stronger community of well-prepared students.”
Hailey said engineering populations do not include many women or other underrepresented groups. This trend may be due in part to how material is presented in high school education, Hailey said. Female students do not consider careers in engineering because they have already disconnected from the idea in K-12 education, Hailey said.
“By the time students come here, they want to study journalism or be an English teacher or an education major,” Hailey said, “because those tend to be traditional majors for women and they don’t think about engineering because they don’t know.”
The center hopes to link technology educators with engineering educators in a “symbiotic alliance that will infuse engineering content, design and analytical skills into K-12 schools”, Cartwright said in a press release.
Hailey said the college of engineering will gain visibility through this grant and will hopefully “improve our understanding of engineering education.”
“When you say engineering, quality education may not be the first thing that pops into your mind – but it should be,” Hailey said. “We should be greatly concerned about how our students learn. I see an indirect gain for our students from the center.”
-kcashton@cc.usu.edu