GENDER PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT OF UNIQUE HANDS-ON INQUIRY BASED ENGINEERING LESSONS IN SECONDARY MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCE CLASSROOMS

摘要

The University of Cincinnati's National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate K-12 Fellow's grant, Project STEP -Science and Technology Enhancement Program, was created to train graduate students so that they bring their technical background and expertise into the classroom guided by current experienced teachers so that students can be effectively engaged and can relate the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) knowledge they learn to the world they live in. Eight research fellows were trained to bring their engineering experiences, both academic and professional, to area classrooms through the creation of unique hands-on inquiry based learning activities. Each of the STEP fellows work together with an assigned mathematics or science teacher to develop these unique hands-on activities in order to align them to state academic standards. The fellows then present these lessons to each of their classes in an effort to gain practical secondary teaching experience. In addition, the fellows also perform all grading and assessment of these activities. On occasion, the teachers will also administer these lessons to help demonstrate alternative teaching and classroom management techniques. However, in this study, each lesson for which the data is presented was taught by a STEP fellow. Project STEP believes that through effectively demonstrating the relevance of mathematics and science topics through real-world issues and current community events, a stronger student affinity towards these subjects can be achieved. This paper explores the development of student attitudes towards math and science topics on a gender basis. Seven classrooms of 11th grade math and science students were used in this study to provide quantitative and qualitative data to support the authors' beliefs.