Engineering

The incorporation of engineering practices and core ideas into the Next Generation Science Standards at the elementary school level provides exciting opportunities but also raises important questions about the preparation of new elementary teachers. Both the teacher education and engineering education communities have a limited literature base on the resources that novice elementary teachers bring to learning and teaching engineering.

Problem scoping—determining the nature and boundaries of a problem—is an essential aspect of the engineering design process. Some studies from engineering education suggest that beginning students tend to skip problem scoping or oversimplify a problem. However, the ways these studies often characterize students’ problem scoping often do not reflect the complexity found in experts’ designing and rely on the number of criteria a student mentions or the time spent problem scoping.