Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

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elementary teachers in articulation and reflection of their engineering teaching
experiences so as to make the tacit nature of their engineering teaching practice and the
pedagogical reasons behind their engineering teaching more explicit.
Participants
The interviews of the study involved 73 elementary teachers who received one week
elementary engineering education training in the INSPIRE Summer Academy at Arlington
(see table 1 for demographic information) either in 2008 or 2009. A total of 101
interviews were conducted which include both individual interviews and group
interviews.
N
Gender Years of teaching Grade level
F M 0-2 3-5 6-10 Over
11
2 3 4
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011
Instructional
Facilitator
(Across
Grades)
73 67 6 5 19 18 31 22 26 22 3
Procedures of Data Collection
Table 1: Demographic information of teacher participants
The face-to-face group interviews were conducted in June 2008, December 2008, and
December 2009. In group interviews, the elementary teachers were grouped into groups
of three to six based on their individual schedules and each group was interviewed by a
member of our research team each time. The individual interviews took place in May 2009
and May 2010 respectively. All interviews were audio-taped and then transcribed. The
open-ended survey was posted on SurveyMonkey in July 2009 and the survey data were
collected in September 2009. The data were sorted in an Excel file after collection.
Data Analysis
The individual interview transcripts were first divided into “Title I Schools” group and
“Non-Title I Schools” group. Based on the elementary teachers‟ years of teaching
experience, the “Title I Schools” group was divided into groups of 1, 2, 3, and 4, and the
“Non-Title I Schools” group was divided into groups of 5, 6, 7, and 8. Group 1 and group 5
were “0-2 years” groups, group 2 and group 6 were “3-5 years” groups, group 3 and group
7 were “6-10 years” groups, and group 4 and group 8 were “over 11 years” groups. Three
interview transcripts were randomly selected from each of the eight groups. The 24
individual interview transcripts and the answers to the open-ended online survey were
first analyzed.
The principles of analytic induction were adopted to guide the data analysis process
(Bogdan & Biklen, 2007) allowing the researchers to build patterns of meaning from the
data (Patton, 2002). Specifically, each interview transcript and each teacher‟s responses to
the survey questions were treated as an independent text. Each text was read on a line-by-