Ac 2010-447: Middle-school Teachers’ Use and Development of Engineering Subject Matter Knowledge

This paper reports on a portion of a study of three middle school teachers (two mathematics teachers and one science teacher) as they taught a unit of engineering instruction. The study investigated the subject matter and pedagogical content knowledge these teachers used and developed as they taught with materials that used LEGO to introduce students to the engineering design process while designing and building a computer-controlled assistive device that utilizes motors and sensors. This paper focuses and reports on the subject matter knowledge the teachers learned and used, including a subject new to them—engineering, based on teacher interviews and classroom observations. The data revealed how a teacher’s knowledge of physics or engineering impacted their teaching, and that the teachers rarely connected their mathematics or science knowledge to make connections to engineering explicitly. One conjecture made from the data collected during the study is that teachers would benefit from focused opportunities to develop the different specific types of engineering knowledge that they struggle with the most (i.e., concepts in physics, mathematics, programming and engineering design).