Publication

The NGSS are national standards developed by educators, teachers, and scientists across the nation to address and enhance STEM education. NGSS highlights the importance of including science and engineering practices in K-12 classrooms. However, teacher certification and professional development (PD) programs require significant support to facilitate integration of engineering and technology in K-12 schools. Many teachers report having low self-efficacy in their ability to teach science, which in turn affects students’ science learning. The development of self-efficacy relies on four key components, viz., performance accomplishments, vicarious learning, verbal persuasion, and emotional arousal. To address teacher self-efficacy, we designed a hands-on, summer STEM PD workshop. Our effort included the development of an NGSS-aligned robotics curriculum, its delivery, and refinement during the PD workshop. In this study, we investigated teachers’ robotics self-efficacy and content knowledge as they learned robotics and whether our robotic PD workshop was effective in increasing their self-efficacy and understanding of content principles.

Our PD workshop was a four-week summer program consisting of a two-week guided training and a two-week collaborative robotic-product development. The workshop was attended by 18 teachers and 33 high students from 10 inner-city high schools located in an urban environment. This paper is devoted to analyzing the self-efficacy and content learning outcomes for the teachers of our PD workshop. Surveys and a technical quiz are used to examine whether the PD workshop contributes to any changes in the teachers’ self-efficacy, knowledge, and familiarity vis-à-vis robotics. The following preliminary pre-/post-test results are indicative of the workshop’s impact: the teachers’ familiarity with robotics devices improved from an average of 1.74 to 3.37 on a scale of 1 to 5; their robotics self-efficacy improved from an average of 58.97 to 68.63 on a scale of 100; and their average score on a technical quiz improved from 14.39 to 18.17 on a scale of 30. A complete description of the workshop content, hands-on activities, and full analysis of survey and technical quiz results will be presented in the final paper. A complete description of the workshop content, hands-on activities, and full analysis of survey and technical quiz results are provided in the subsequent sections of the paper.