Design & Development: Colorado Science and Engineering Inquiry Collaborative

It is important to design, develop and investigate educational programs to support the development of interests and skills in engineering for advancing technology needs in the 21st Century. This project, Design & Development: Colorado SCience and ENgineering Inquiry Collaborative (SCENIC), will meet these needs through the development of engaging, hands-on air and soil quality environmental engineering curriculum and an associated outreach infrastructure to support rural Colorado middle and high school students’ learning and engineering identity development.

These inquiry-based curricula will be developed and refined in Colorado science classrooms at rural K-12 schools by a collaborative partnership between high schools students, University of Colorado Boulder (CU) students and faculty as well as high school teachers and local community partners. The curriculum will integrate CU environmental monitoring equipment into science and/or engineering classrooms to allow middle/high schools students to investigate environmental issues in their own community, with the support of college students pursuing engineering degrees.

Results of the rural high school students’ inquiry projects will be presented to members of local communities at an event at the end of the school year. Throughout the project, a team of CU researchers will investigate the process to understand how students begin to identify with engineering, what is working about the collaborations and where improvement is needed for the following school year.

This project contributes to research in the formation of engineers including an understanding of how students are formed into engineers, how to transform the system to better develop engineers, and how to provide a roadmap for others to develop similar initiatives.

The proposed design and development project would investigate and refine an educational infrastructure for supporting engineering and science learning and identity formation in an outreach program in twelve rural Colorado high schools. Design-based research will both inform the refinement of the materials and approach for supporting high school student inquiry, and advance our fundamental understanding of the underlying processes and mechanisms that support engineering identity formation.

The research questions are: How do aspects of the outreach program’s educational infrastructure support rural high school students’ participation in and identification with engineering and science? How does conducting locally relevant environmental monitoring contribute to rural students’ engineering and science identity development? SCENIC integrates university engineering faculty and student mentors with rural high schools via on-line, interactive curriculum and in-person visits to support high school students in carrying out educationally impactful local environmental monitoring projects.

University undergraduate and graduate engineering students enroll in a two-semester course that prepares them to mentor the high school students. Environmental monitoring pods and other educational resources and interactive support mechanisms will be iteratively improved via design-based research. The project will advance knowledge regarding the adaptation of cutting-edge university research tools for environmental monitoring into high school classrooms to impact engineering identity development.

SCENIC’s university-supported curriculum and mentoring will impact rural students, school districts, and local communities. Results will be disseminated through symposiums at the rural high schools where students showcase their work, peer-reviewed publications, local and national conferences, and through curriculum published in the NSF-supported TeachEngineering Digital Library.

Publications and conference sessions will explicitly target both research audiences and practicing teacher audiences at both K-12 and higher education levels.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.