Books by Demetra Evangelou, PhD
The case of mixed age grouping in early childhood education
Papers by Demetra Evangelou, PhD
International Journal of STEM Education, 2015
Background: The newly formed discipline of engineering education is addressing the need to (a) en... more Background: The newly formed discipline of engineering education is addressing the need to (a) enhance STEM education for precollege students and (b) identify optimum ways to introduce engineering content starting, perhaps, from the early ages. Introducing engineering at the Prekindergarten through 12th grade (PreK-12) education level requires significant changes in teacher preparation and support. It highlights the need for developing developmentally appropriate content knowledge and pedagogical methods, thus revealing the challenges of preparing teachers to incorporate this type of knowledge base into their practice. Although professional development offered by universities, school districts, and other educational entities provides the primary source of formal learning tools for teachers, an increasing number of teachers also utilize other informal web-based resources regularly. This paper examines available PreK-12 engineering web resources offered by entities formally related to education in seven different languages, namely Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), English, French, Greek, Korean, and Spanish. Results: Findings showed how different educational systems designated different attention to the entry level ages when introducing engineering content. Differences in the terminology used to identify STEM resources for introducing these topics also became apparent. Similarities suggest that a large number of resources available on the web were originating in all researched languages. However, the developmental appropriateness and content validity of many of these resources remained questionable in many cases. In general, there was a plethora of isolated activities and lesson plans but significantly fewer complete engineering curricula available to teachers on the web. Conclusions: This study presents a comparative analysis of the international landscape of PreK-12 engineering education and provides guidelines and samples of state-of-the art resources in each language for teachers interested in introducing their students to engineering as a reliable starting point towards PreK-12 engineering information gathering.
European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 2015
Secondary school, age range 11-14, technology and engineering education in England has been deliv... more Secondary school, age range 11-14, technology and engineering education in England has been delivered mainly within Design and Technology (D&T). This inadvertently makes D&T teachers responsible for pupils' engineering education and motivation. This paper analyses D&T teachers' (N = 33) technology subject knowledge through self-assessment competency questionnaires, before and after developing a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)-focused project of their choice for their classroom. Participants were least confident in teaching the areas of technology that required mathematics and scientific knowledge. The results analyse a suggested misalignment between teachers' Creative Arts background subject knowledge compared to the technology subject knowledge required for engineering education. Suggested causes of this issue are Initial Teacher Training standards and curriculum flexibility, not teacher capability. The paper concludes that teachers have been unaware of some elements of STEM education and that continuing professional development interventions are required to assist teachers and improve their engineering knowledge in order to better equip their pupils for engineering.
Decision Making In First Year Engineering: Exploring How Students Decide About Future Studies And Career Pathways
The number of students enrolling in engineering has declined steadily over the last fifteen years... more The number of students enrolling in engineering has declined steadily over the last fifteen years, and the number of engineers joining certain fields in engineering has decreased even more drastically. A number of studies have demonstrated a strong relationship between students’ interests and abilities and their persistence in engineering. It is therefore logical to assume that students who choose a major which makes the best use of their skills and engages their interest, are more likely to not only stay, but also thrive in the field of engineering which they choose. Students who make a poor choice, because of incomplete information or misconceptions about various disciplines, often find themselves frustrated and sometimes leave engineering altogether. A number of colleges offer first-year programs with the explicit intention of helping students make informed choices by introducing them to the various engineering disciplines before they are required to select one. The success of th...
Troubleshooting Skills for Non-Engineers In Technological Jobs
Although there is an increasingly interest for people to become technologically literate, there e... more Although there is an increasingly interest for people to become technologically literate, there exists a technical knowledge gap between industry needs and workforce competencies, especially in developing countries such Colombia. That is why technological skills such as troubleshooting need to be developed. Moreover, learning technology skills may be used as a tool for learning new context-specific knowledge.
Troubleshooting Skills for Non-Engineers In Technological Jobs
Engineering in Early Education: A Multicultural Comparison of Web Resources
When introducing engineering at the early education level, teachers’ and parents’ preparation and... more When introducing engineering at the early education level, teachers’ and parents’ preparation and support become a crucial factor. Introducing engineering in the early years raises a need for understanding the content, while also posing the challenge of preparing teachers to incorporate it into their practice. Teachers have left the traditional method of looking for new information in books, journals and magazines. Further when examining international school settings, the development of technological infrastructure is not on the same level in every country. The advent of the Internet, coming at a faster or slower pace, created an expansion of how teachers receive professional development and how they prepare for courses. In parallel the wide information release is also used by many parents who are trying to enhance their children’s informal education. While the professional development offered by universities and school districts and further educational entities provides the majority of formal options accessed by teachers, many informal sources are also utilized by teachers and parents on a day-to-day basis. A preliminary search for P-12 engineering materials revealed a wide variety of curricula, lesson plans and activities. Narrowing it down to the P-3 level though reveals that the pedagogical and content reliable sources at that level are very limited and particularly tough to identify among the plethora of information. Furthermore, although the internet allows for access to curricula developed and offered to a global audience, the language in which this content is presented is still a barrier and while it makes the content widely available to some target groups, there is still a large number of teachers that cannot take advantage of this shared information. This study is an attempt to examine the existing early education engineering curricula created by entities officially related to education in 7 different languages. It also aims to present the current comparative international landscape of this field, and offer to teachers and parents interested in introducing their children to engineering a reliable starting point towards early engineering information gathering. The paper also addresses emerging pedagogical and engineering fidelity issues.
Engineering in Early Education: A Multicultural Comparison of Web Resources
When introducing engineering at the early education level, teachers’ and parents’ preparation and... more When introducing engineering at the early education level, teachers’ and parents’ preparation and support become a crucial factor. Introducing engineering in the early years raises a need for understanding the content, while also posing the challenge of preparing teachers to incorporate it into their practice. Teachers have left the traditional method of looking for new information in books, journals and magazines. Further when examining international school settings, the development of technological infrastructure is not on the same level in every country. The advent of the Internet, coming at a faster or slower pace, created an expansion of how teachers receive professional development and how they prepare for courses. In parallel the wide information release is also used by many parents who are trying to enhance their children’s informal education. While the professional development offered by universities and school districts and further educational entities provides the majority of formal options accessed by teachers, many informal sources are also utilized by teachers and parents on a day-to-day basis.
A preliminary search for P-12 engineering materials revealed a wide variety of curricula, lesson plans and activities. Narrowing it down to the P-3 level though reveals that the pedagogical and content reliable sources at that level are very limited and particularly tough to identify among the plethora of information. Furthermore, although the internet allows for access to curricula developed and offered to a global audience, the language in which this content is presented is still a barrier and while it makes the content widely available to some target groups, there is still a large number of teachers that cannot take advantage of this shared information.
This study is an attempt to examine the existing early education engineering curricula created by entities officially related to education in 7 different languages. It also aims to present the current comparative international landscape of this field, and offer to teachers and parents interested in introducing their children to engineering a reliable starting point towards early engineering information gathering. The paper also addresses emerging pedagogical and engineering fidelity issues.
Practicing engineering while building with blocks: identifying engineering thinking
Children's free play naturally enhances skills of observation, communication, experimentation, as... more Children's free play naturally enhances skills of observation, communication, experimentation, as well as development of rationale and construction skills. These domains, while synthesised, can lead to the development of certain process models regarding the way constructions could be designed, built and improved. The Design Process model constitutes a core concept of engineering. Blocks seem to be one of the best tools to use in order to work towards the development of such a model. This is a qualitative observational study in preschoolers’ free playing with blocks. Eighteen children aged three- to five-years-old were observed and videotaped for four months to examine whether young children can demonstrate instances of precursors to engineering behaviour while building, by demonstrating similarities to the Design Process. Analysis of the video data showed that children demonstrated and articulated goal-oriented design, problem-solving thinking, innovation stemming out of synthesis of multiple designs, pattern repetition (PR) and design testing (DT).
Currículos De Ingeniería En La Educación Infantil. Descripción De La Gama De Recursos Abiertos
Números
El debate nacional sobre la instrucción en STEM (siglas en inglés de Ciencia, Tecnología, Ingenie... more El debate nacional sobre la instrucción en STEM (siglas en inglés de Ciencia, Tecnología, Ingeniería y Matemticas) entre el kindergarten y el grado 12 ha dado origen a preguntas sobre los materiales apropiados para la instrucción en ingeniería en clases del preescolar al grado 12. La ...
While the effects of child care quality on low-income children and parents are well documented, l... more While the effects of child care quality on low-income children and parents are well documented, little is known about how local communities are providing child care to low-income working families in the wake of welfare reform in the mid-1990s. The three-year Community Child Care Research Project examined child care for young children used by low-income working families in four Indiana communities (Marion, Lake, Allen, and St. Joseph counties). The project was funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services/Child Care Bureau and conducted by researchers at Purdue University. Sources of the research data were parent focus groups, interviews with community child care leaders, structured observations and assessments of 307 children in their child care settings, and questionnaires completed by parents and caregivers.
icpsr.umich.edu
Skip to Main Content. Home | Browse by... |. | Contact Us | font resize. Child Care & Early Educa... more Skip to Main Content. Home | Browse by... |. | Contact Us | font resize. Child Care & Early Education Research Connections. ...
International Journal of STEM Education, 2015
Background: The newly formed discipline of engineering education is addressing the need to (a) en... more Background: The newly formed discipline of engineering education is addressing the need to (a) enhance STEM education for precollege students and (b) identify optimum ways to introduce engineering content starting, perhaps, from the early ages. Introducing engineering at the Prekindergarten through 12th grade (PreK-12) education level requires significant changes in teacher preparation and support. It highlights the need for developing developmentally appropriate content knowledge and pedagogical methods, thus revealing the challenges of preparing teachers to incorporate this type of knowledge base into their practice. Although professional development offered by universities, school districts, and other educational entities provides the primary source of formal learning tools for teachers, an increasing number of teachers also utilize other informal web-based resources regularly. This paper examines available PreK-12 engineering web resources offered by entities formally related to education in seven different languages, namely Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), English, French, Greek, Korean, and Spanish. Results: Findings showed how different educational systems designated different attention to the entry level ages when introducing engineering content. Differences in the terminology used to identify STEM resources for introducing these topics also became apparent. Similarities suggest that a large number of resources available on the web were originating in all researched languages. However, the developmental appropriateness and content validity of many of these resources remained questionable in many cases. In general, there was a plethora of isolated activities and lesson plans but significantly fewer complete engineering curricula available to teachers on the web. Conclusions: This study presents a comparative analysis of the international landscape of PreK-12 engineering education and provides guidelines and samples of state-of-the art resources in each language for teachers interested in introducing their students to engineering as a reliable starting point towards PreK-12 engineering information gathering.
Early engineering: A developmentally appropriate curriculum for young children
Engineering education for the pre-college years is a developing academic discipline that emanates... more Engineering education for the pre-college years is a developing academic discipline that emanates from the need to understand and improve the ways that engineers are formally educated. To date, there are no curricula available that incorporate engineering at a preschool level. The focus of this study is on the development of an early engineering curriculum for a preschool classroom which will complement the traditional emphasis on developing basic literacy, numeracy, and science along with social, emotional, and motor skills, while retaining high fidelity of the early engineering content addressed. ^ The current work presents a qualitative case study examining the developmental appropriateness of the early engineering curriculum and reports on its effect on children's learning and on the teacher's experience while implementing the early engineering curriculum in class for three months. The setting for this study is a suburban university campus-based child care program in the Midwestern U.S. The participants are 11 children, 10 boys and one girl, their parents, and the classroom teacher. The children's learning is divided into the categories of knowledge, skills, dispositions, and feelings; subcategories of these four main categories are also discussed. The findings support the developmental appropriateness of the early engineering curriculum developed, along with the feasibility and the necessity of the implementation. The teacher's experience is analyzed based on factors reported by the teacher and the researcher that either facilitated or hindered the implementation process. These factors included multiple stakeholders, namely, the teacher, the children, the parents, the school administration, and the curriculum developer. The factors are intended to be used as guides to form future elaborate versions of the early engineering curriculum. Questions regarding the optimum systematic assessment method for this curriculum are also raised as points of future research.
Practicing Engineering while Building with Blocks: Identifying Engineering Thinking
Children’s free play naturally enhances skills of observation, communication, experimentation, as... more Children’s free play naturally enhances skills of observation, communication, experimentation, as well as development of rationale and construction skills. These domains, while synthesized, can lead to the development of certain process models regarding the way constructions could be designed, built and improved. The Design Process model constitutes a core concept of engineering. Blocks seem to be one of the best tools to use in order to work towards the development of such a model. This is a qualitative observational study in preschoolers’ free playing with blocks. Eighteen children aged 3-5 were observed and videotaped for four months to examine whether young children can demonstrate instances of precursors to engineering behaviour while building, by demonstrating similarities to the Design Process. Analysis of the video data showed that children demonstrated and articulated goal-oriented design, problem-solving thinking, innovation stemming out of synthesis of multiple designs, pattern repetition and design testing.
Engineering curriculum in the preschool classroom: The teacher’s experience.
EECERJ
""The study presented here focuses on the development of an early education Science, Technology, ... more ""The study presented here focuses on the development of an early education Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) curriculum with emphasis on engineering. This paper presents the teacher’s experience as she undertook the task of familiarizing herself with the new content and using the curriculum in a university based lab-school classroom in the USA. More specifically, the paper describes and analyses the collaboration between the teacher and the curriculum developer. It also presents facilitators and barriers during the implementation, as identified by the teacher and the researchers, reports on the multiple stakeholders involved, and raises questions for future research.
Engineering education in the precollege years is a developing academic discipline that stems from the need to understand and improve the ways engineers are formally educated. The belief of early experiences as determinants of later experiences has long constituted a basis of educational planning. Therefore, identifying the appropriate age and manner in which early childhood education becomes part of engineering education, is very important in the current climate. ""
D Bairaktarova, D Evangelou, A Bagiati, J Dobbs-Oates (2012) The role of classroom artifacts in developmental engineering. Proceedings of American Society for Engineering Education Conference, 2012
Initial research findings examining the developmental appropriateness of introducing engineering ... more Initial research findings examining the developmental appropriateness of introducing engineering at an early age suggest that activities and content relevant to engineering are appropriate for young children [1, 2]. Objects in children’s environment appear to be influential in the development of engineering thinking as they contribute to exploratory learning [3] which is long recognized as a developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood education [4, 5]. The present study investigates how children and teachers use artifacts in exploratory learning.
In this paper we present a study designed to investigate the engineering environment present in preschool classroom. The study builds on prior research related to young children’s interactions with artifacts and possible implications to developmental engineering. We focus on questions related to the preschool classroom environment such as: 1) what artifacts appear to be the most common in classrooms, according to the teachers’ responses? 2) How do children interact with the artifacts that exist in the classroom? 3) Do the teachers use the existing artifacts to plan organized activities? 4) Are there any differences based on the mission of the preschool programs?
Early Engineering in Young Children’s Exploratory Play with Tangible Materials
The developmental importance of play in early childhood is well documented. However, little resea... more The developmental importance of play in early childhood is well documented. However, little research exists to date to describe how child play relates to engineering thinking. The goal of this study is to determine whether spontaneously occurring classroom play and involvement with open, semi-structured and structured artifacts such as sandboxes, water tables, and puzzles, may reveal precursors to engineering thinking and acting. To gather such evidence we conducted a series of naturalistic field observations of preschool children engaged in free play with these artifacts. This study describes ways this play activity enables children’s involvement with engineering ideas and engineering activities. Findings from this study contribute to our understanding of how play environments can become vehicles for enhancement of early engineering knowledge and action.
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Books by Demetra Evangelou, PhD
Papers by Demetra Evangelou, PhD
A preliminary search for P-12 engineering materials revealed a wide variety of curricula, lesson plans and activities. Narrowing it down to the P-3 level though reveals that the pedagogical and content reliable sources at that level are very limited and particularly tough to identify among the plethora of information. Furthermore, although the internet allows for access to curricula developed and offered to a global audience, the language in which this content is presented is still a barrier and while it makes the content widely available to some target groups, there is still a large number of teachers that cannot take advantage of this shared information.
This study is an attempt to examine the existing early education engineering curricula created by entities officially related to education in 7 different languages. It also aims to present the current comparative international landscape of this field, and offer to teachers and parents interested in introducing their children to engineering a reliable starting point towards early engineering information gathering. The paper also addresses emerging pedagogical and engineering fidelity issues.
Engineering education in the precollege years is a developing academic discipline that stems from the need to understand and improve the ways engineers are formally educated. The belief of early experiences as determinants of later experiences has long constituted a basis of educational planning. Therefore, identifying the appropriate age and manner in which early childhood education becomes part of engineering education, is very important in the current climate. ""
In this paper we present a study designed to investigate the engineering environment present in preschool classroom. The study builds on prior research related to young children’s interactions with artifacts and possible implications to developmental engineering. We focus on questions related to the preschool classroom environment such as: 1) what artifacts appear to be the most common in classrooms, according to the teachers’ responses? 2) How do children interact with the artifacts that exist in the classroom? 3) Do the teachers use the existing artifacts to plan organized activities? 4) Are there any differences based on the mission of the preschool programs?