An Analysis of the Effect of Long-Term Professional Development on Teacher Engineering Self-Efficacy and Its Impact on Classroom Instruction

Abstract

Pre-college engineering education has gained traction in U.S. schools over the past twenty years. This growth is evident with engineering emerging as a crosscutting discipline in the Next Generation Science Standards. However, the scarcity of professional development (PD) for K-12 teachers who want to teach engineering and the few PD opportunities with the characteristics shown to improve teacher learning, i.e., contact time, long-term support, and follow-up, suggest a need for new and innovative PD offerings for K-12 teachers. We developed a 45-hour graduate course specifically for K-12 teachers to incorporate engineering into their classrooms and evaluated the effect of this long-term PD on K-12 teaching engineering self-efficacy. Additionally, this study looked at how the participants translated the course into their teaching practices. Forty-one in-service teachers participated either in a 2018 or 2019 semester-long course that combined nanotechnology content and Project-Based Learning pedagogy. Pre-post measures using Teaching Engineering Self-Efficacy Scale (TESS) revealed significant gains in the self-efficacy in both cohort teachers. Teachers found the course effective in building their technical skills and providing beneficial PD. The significant positive outcomes from this study indicate that the course analyzed serves as a model for pre-college engineering education PD.