Massachusetts Engineering Innovation and Dissemination Community (MEIDC)

Education researchers, practitioners, industry representatives, and policymakers are increasingly committed to making engineering education accessible to all K-12 students and teachers. This project is designed to learn what type of collaborative infrastructure would best support NSF awardees in engaging in the innovative, synergistic research, development, and dissemination activities that will enable engineering to fulfill this important role in K-12 teaching and learning. 

Full Description

Education researchers, practitioners, industry representatives, and policymakers are increasingly committed to making engineering education accessible to all K-12 students and teachers. This RAPID project is designed to learn what type of collaborative infrastructure would best support NSF awardees in engaging in the innovative, synergistic research, development, and dissemination activities that will enable engineering to fulfill this important role in K-12 teaching and learning. Focusing on Massachusetts (and the greater Boston area in particular), researchers from Tufts University and EDC will conduct a landscape analysis of K-12 engineering education, highlighting opportunities, gaps, and resources, and identifying areas of overlapping interests among NSF awardees and other stakeholders that may translate into a focus for purposeful activities.

While Massachusetts (and the greater Boston area in particular) serves as a major center for NSF-funded K-12 engineering education research and development activities, NSF awardees engaged in engineering education and housed in institutions around the area do not routinely meet and collaborate as a group in an effort to improve engineering education, and there is currently no infrastructure in place to support NSF awardees and cross-sector collaboration in K-12 engineering education on an ongoing basis. Thus this is an appropriate testbed for a project concerned to learn more about infrastructures to support funded researchers in efforts to enhance K-12 engineering education. The researchers will concurrently conduct a robust literature review and interview key stakeholders across sectors (starting with NSF awardees). A report of findings from this landscape analysis will be disseminated broadly with the goal of informing K-12 engineering education efforts both in the area and nationally.

Read the project's report, Engineering for Every K-12 Studenthttp://ceeo.tufts.edu/documents/researchMEIDCreport.pdf 

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