Elementary engineering education reform does not happen in isolation of school, classroom, and student level contexts. Many factors, both related and unrelated to teacher professional development will likely influence students' achievement of engineering. While most of the literature concerning the effectiveness of teacher professional development focuses on the quality of the professional development program, there are contextual differences that can lead to differing outcomes between schools within the same school district, and even teachers within the same school; author et al., under review. Furthermore, small studies focused on one or two variables associated with student learning are limited and may have confounding variables that are unaccounted for by the model. Therefore, there is a need to comprehensively examine what contextual factors and mediators influence students' learning of engineering and which are not significant.
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