Greg Pearson

It’s been only one week since the public launch of LinkEngineering, and already we’ve seen a wonderful example of the site’s potential to connect people interested in improving implementation of PreK-12 engineering education.

LinkEngineering member Sneha Tharayil, a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin, posted a Work in Progress about a running shoe design project she developed for 8th graders. The project was part of a motion and forces physical science unit, focusing on the concept of friction. Sneha needed help creating a process students could use to test their designs. In stepped LE member Jennifer Love, a former performance engineer at Reebok International and now a teaching professor in the First Year Engineering Learning Center in the College of Engineering at Northeastern University. “Would you be interested in collaborating with a former athletic footwear engineer on your friction ‘work in progress?’" she asked. The two have exchanged emails and agreed to continue their discussions offline.

We hope they’ll report back on how their collaboration went!

Greg Pearson, National Academy of Engineering, shared an update

PostedMonday, October 13, 2014 at 5:37 AM

Education in the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) is widely considered vital to US innovation capacity and successful

Education in the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) is widely considered vital to US innovation capacity and successful employment, including jobs beyond the STEM fields. But historically, US K–12 STEM education has focused on the individual subjects, particularly science and mathematics. With recent calls for improvements in the quality of curricula and instruction to emphasize connections among the subjects, new instructional materials, programs, and specialized schools are emerging.

The Next Generation of Science Standards, which connects science concepts and practices to those of engineering, has elevated the idea of integrated STEM education. This report characterizes approaches to integrated STEM education, in both formal and after- and out-of-school settings. It also reviews evidence of the impacts of integrated approaches on student outcomes such as greater awareness, interest, motivation, and achievement in STEM subjects; improved college readiness skills; and boosts in the number of students who may consider a career in a STEM-related field.

The report makes recommendations for designers of integrated STEM experiences, assessment developers, and researchers to design and document effective integrated STEM education.

More info on the NAE Website.

Greg Pearson is a Scholar with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in Washington, D.C. Greg currently serves as the responsible staff officer for the NSF-funded project “The Status, Role, and Needs of Engineering Technology Education in the United States.” He is also study director for the Chevron-funded project, Guiding Implementation of K-12 Engineering in the United States. He was the study director for the NAE and National Research Council project that resulted in the 2014 report, STEM Integration in K-12 Education: Status, Prospects, and an Agenda for Research. He was the study director for the project that resulted in publication of Standards for K-12 Engineering Education? (2010) and Engineering in K-12 Education: Understanding the Status and Improving the Prospects (2009), an analysis of efforts to teach engineering to U.S. school children. He oversaw the NSF-funded project that resulted in the 2013 publication of Messaging for Engineering: From Research to Action and the 2008 publication of Changing the Conversation: Messages for Improving Public Understanding of Engineering and was co-editor of the reports Tech Tally: Approaches to Assessing Technological Literacy (2006) and Technically Speaking: Why All Americans Need to Know More About Technology (2002). In the late 1990s, Greg oversaw NAE and National Research Council reviews of technology education content standards developed by the International Technology Education Association. He has degrees in biology and journalism.