Educational leaders and researchers have mandated that technical education and academic subject areas be integrated so students can develop both academic and occupational competency. Mathematics, in particular, is recognized for its singular importance for modeling and generalization. In response to this clarion call, engineering and K-12 pre-engineering curricula are being developed and redesigned to invigorate the engineering pipeline and to provide an integrated program of STEM education. Explicit integration also enhances the likelihood that learners will be able to transfer new knowledge to novel situations. An important research aim, then, is to document the extent to which these objectives are being achieved. In conducting the current study, our goal was to identify all instances of explicit integration of mathematics concepts in three pre-engineering curricula that make up the 3-year foundations sequence for a widely adopted high school technical education program, Project Lead the Way (PLTW). Explicit integration is defined as any instance wherein the materials specifically point to a mathematics principle, law, or formula, and depict how it is used to carry out or understand an engineering concept, task or skill. We used the Standards as adopted by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to determine the target math concepts. For each of the three foundations courses, we analyzed the content of: (a) the intended curricula, including planning materials, performance objectives and classroom activities; (b) the assessed curricula, including student projects and presentations, and written examinations; and (c) and the teacher training materials. In addition to the structure of each course, we looked for alignment between the intended and assessed curricula and for the longitudinal progression as one advances through the 3-year program of courses.
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