Assessing the Reactionary Response of High School Engineering Teachers Offering a Novel Pre-College Engineering Curriculum: Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic forced a rapid transition of K-16 education to remote and online learning in the final quarter of the 2019–2020 school year. The disruption was extreme for all teachers in K-12 but particularly for teachers involved in pilot programs, such as the NSF-funded Engineering for Us All (e4usa) project. This paper reports the key findings obtained through systematic data collection from a pilot cohort of high school teachers who adapted a brand-new engineering curriculum during the COVID-19 pandemic, students who experienced the adapted curriculum, and a new cohort of teachers who were tasked with teaching the updated curriculum.

Keywords

• pandemic
• k-12
• e4usa
• curriculum
• engineering