Kalem, Emel (2021-12). Relations Among Students' Career Choices and Teachers' and Parents' Engineering Knowledge, Attitude, and Behavior. Doctoral Dissertation.
Thesis
The overarching purpose of this dissertation was to understand and improve teachers' and parents' understanding of engineers and engineering. The purpose of the first study was to investigate the effectiveness of a two-week-long, engineering-focused professional development (PD) for teachers. In the first study, I utilized a mixed-methods research approach to explore and document the effects of the PD activities on the engineering knowledge and skills of 12 teacher-participants. In the second study, I captured and documented the characteristics of the mental images teachers had regarding engineers and engineering. In this study, I focused on understanding how 24 teachers' perceptions of engineers and engineering changed after they completed the engineering-focused PD. I utilized a qualitative research approach to explore the teachers' perceptions and mental images of engineers and engineering. In the third study, I investigated 45 parents' knowledge of and attitudes towards engineering and how they engaged their children in engineering-related programs. In this study, utilizing a quantitative approach, I focused on understanding the relations between the parents' knowledge, attitudes, and behavior in regard to engineering and their perceptions of their children's summer camp learning experiences. The results from the first study suggest that participation in the engineering-focused PDs effectively enabled teachers to understand some advanced technologies and engineering concepts and to improve their knowledge about how to teach these concepts. The findings of the second study show that the teachers gained a better understanding of the skills needed by engineers, including computer programming and collaboration. The teachers increased their awareness of the activities engineers engage in, for example, coding and problem solving, and they became more knowledgeable about the tools engineers use. For example, after their participation in the PD activities, they named or drew electronic devices and hand tools more often than laboratory equipment, which is associated more often with scientists than with engineers. In the third study, the students participated in a summer camp and then gave presentations to their parents on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Night. The findings indicate that the parents improved their knowledge of engineering and technology topics after they participated. Their perceptions of their children's knowledge of engineering and technology topics also increased. Moreover, even though the parents' knowledge of engineering was relatively low, they showed positive attitudes and behavior towards engineering. I further examined whether there were any significant differences in how the parents of different demographic groups rated knowledge, attitudes, and behavior constructs. While I did not observe any statistically significant differences on the three constructs among the parents of different education level, ethnicity, and gender, or among parents whose children's grades differed or whose children attended school in different locations, there was a statistically significant difference among parents in different age groups in the engineering behavior scores, with the older parents registering higher scores. In addition, parents' engineering knowledge and their engineering behavior displayed a statistically significant and moderately positive correlation, and their engineering attitudes showed a statistically significant and moderately positive correlation with their engineering behavior. No significant correlation was observed among the other variables. Overall, the finding from the three studies is that participation in the engineering-focused PD and other activities impacted teachers' and parents' engineering knowledge, skills, and awareness of engineering-related occupations in a positive way. This finding is critical because there has been a concern about U.S. students' l
