Meanwhile, I'm wondering whether anyone has experience with Project Lead the Way, which my district will be purchasing for school year 2007-2008 and beyond. The school board has sent out an email describing Project Lead the Way "a multi-year engineering program."
Project Lead the Way's mission is to entice more minorities and women into engineering programs:
We will create dynamic partnerships with our nation's schools to prepare an increasing and more diverse group of students to be successful in science, engineering, and engineering technology.
The evaluation of Project Lead the Way (pdf file) devotes many pages to counting the number of black, Hispanic, and female students enrolled in Project Lead the Way classes, as compared to the number of Asian students. Proportional representation is the goal.
Structurally, Project Lead the Way is associated with vocational education, which appears to have morphed into technology education. My guess is that voc-ed, which has been under attack and in decline, is staging a comeback by re-branding itself technology education and "a new type of career and technical program." (pdf file)
The standard glowing account in Education week available here. (pdf file)
As part of a Cleveland High PLTW engineering class, students work in teams to build cardboard boats that they’ll race in the school’s swimming pool. But first they have to calculate how many cubic feet the boat should be, how fast it will sink, and other factors on their own; the only equation they’re given is that one cubic foot of cardboard will sustain 60 pounds. “They get frustrated,” Mr. Clariday said, “but they get to know the math.”
"the top 80%"
Mr. Lowndes, the Wheaton High principal, said “the most impressive thing” about the engineering program is what it does for average students. “It’s teaching them through a cohort how to be successful in school and why it’s important to take the rigorous courses,” he said.
As Lynne M. Gilli, the program manager of the Maryland Department of Education’s career and technical education instructional branch, put it: “We are not trying to recruit the best and brightest” for PLTW pre-engineering programs. “We’re trying to recruit the top 80 percent.”
Interesting that our administration believes a "pre-engineering" program aimed at "the top 80%" is appropriate for kids here.
21st century skills
All PLTW high school courses have several underlying content areas in common. As students progress through the sequence they will become proficient in:.
- working as a contributing member of a team
- leading a team
- using appropriate written and/or visual mediums to communicate with a wide variety of audiences
- public speaking
- listening to the needs and ideas of others
- understanding the potential impact their ideas and products may have on society
- thinking
- problem solving
- managing time, resources and projects
- researching
- going beyond the classroom for answers
- data collection and analysis
- preparing for two-and four-year college programs
PLTW's curriculum makes math and science relevant for students. By engaging in hands-on, real-world projects, students understand how the skills they are learning in the classroom can be applied in everyday life. This approach is called activities-based learning, project-based learning, and problem-based learning or APPB-learning.
pop quiz
This photograph shows students enrolled in Project Lead the Way:
a) working as a contributing member of a team
b) listening to the needs and ideas of others
c) using appropriate written and/or visual mediums to communicate with a wide variety of audiences
d) following simple directions projected on their computer screens
And all of this costs no more than $100K!
calculating the costs of PTLW
2008 cost estimates (pdf file)
software program policy
Costs
A few thoughts....
ReplyDeleteAsian students are dominating engineering and science because they DO math which is conspicuously absent from the '21st century skills list'.
I went to the link and after the first paragraph I blew coffee all over my laptop.
I'm paraphrasing here, 43% percent of the students [who came out of this voluntary program for students who are drawn to engineering and science]actually enrolled in engineering and science in college. This is disproportionately higher than the enrollment rate for kids who are not drawn to engineering and science, who subsequently enroll in engineering or science.
So if my reading is correct this would be analagous to finding that 43% of the people who like chocolate chip cookies actually buy them when they go to the store. This is five times higher than the 8% rate that the people who don't like chocolate chip cookies buy them at. Do people actually pay for studies like this?
Of course, a different reading of this is that 57% of the kids that went through this program discovered that chocolate cookies were not for them. The program would seem to be a big flop wouldn't it.
Plus, and this is the big one for me, why would you want 80% of your population doing engineering and science? That's 240,000,000 people if you succeed.
My head is going to explode!!!!
Just reread the post and lost more coffee!
ReplyDelete“We are not trying to recruit the best and brightest” for PLTW pre-engineering programs. “We’re trying to recruit the top 80 percent.”
So by dipping down to the 20th percentile we are going to compete with India (1 billion people) where you have to be in the 99th percentile to get into IIT. And oh yeah, there's China with another billion or so and similar demands for excellence.
Do these 'technologists' know anything about fractions?
Top 80 percent. That's a lot like our honor roll.
ReplyDeleteSusanS
These are the engineering (?) courses they offer in high school.
ReplyDeleteGrade 9 -
Principles of Engineering
Grade 10 -
Intro to Engineering Design
Grade 11 -
Computer Integrated Manufacturing
Digital Electronics
Grade 12 -
Engineering Design and Development
Then, in their FAQ section, they have the following question:
"Why does PLTW have a math requirement for students enrolled in its program?"
[ed. Duh!]
...
"The first year math course taught at a two-year college for a student enrolled in an AAS degree program in engineering technology is equal to high school pre-calculus. At a four-year engineering college, the typical first year math course is calculus. Therefore, if a student is not academically ready to take these courses, he/she will have difficulty at the two-year or the four-year college level."
In other words, you can forget all of their fluff engineering (?) courses if you can't do the math. They would do better to put their effort into teaching them math. I didn't really know anything about engineering until I went to college, but I did have calculus in high school.
It's nice to provide courses to inspire them, but how many will do well in their engineering (?) courses, but flunk math? They will flunk math because they are spending so much time in their fluff engineering courses. They think they are getting closer to engineering in college, but they are really headed elsewhere.
These are the kids who will end up at the vocational (technical, NOT engineering) school. This isn't bad, but it's not engineering. In fact, many vocational schools also offer degrees (not engineering), and some are very well regarded. A technical degree from one of these schools in our area almost guarantees a well-paying job. That's because their education is focused on needed job skills. This is all very nice for many kids, but it is not engineering. There will be many jobs they cannot apply for. The high school's math programs are more about engineering and their engineering courses are more about technology.
Although this program may be beneficial to many students, it has an air of low expectations like so many other programs geared for disadvantaged kids. How about a program or separate school for kids who can handle curricula like Singapore Math? How about providing expectations and support that will make it happen?
It's hard for me to get excited about this program.
From the university perspective, it is not particularly helpful for them to know a little engineering at the expense of the math/physics/chemistry they might otherwise take. I feel quite certain that engineering schools are good at taking students with a solid foundation of math and basic physics and getting them to where they need to be in engineering. They are not set up to take students who think they know engineering and remediating the math, physics, etc. that they should have as prerequisites.
ReplyDeleteI don't teach engineering, but I do teach calculus, and I have a similar problem. I would rather have students who have never heard of a limit or derivative, but can do algebra and trigonometry. The 40% of the class that come in with the backward set of skills (a little calculus, but not enough algebra) really struggle.
From memory, my engineering courses were dominated by maths, except for software engineering, and the mechanical course, where we learnt arc welding and such-line and never used them again.
ReplyDeleteWe did learn other stuff of course in the classes, but most of it was taught using maths, and the labs generally required maths to analysis the output.
In my crunchy private school, I learned to weld in an art class. :-) (Our art classes were taught by local artists who would come in one day a week, and you'd have two periods sometime during that day to work on projects with their help and supervision.) Where I grew up there were high school welding *teams* -- you'd see kids with letterman's jackets for welding.
ReplyDelete// rambling begins here
Come to think of it, the "two periods" bit was probably one of the best infrastructure ideas in my school -- starting in middle school we had 8 distinct periods a day, 40 minutes each, and schedules were made up over a week. Core classes (math, science, English, foreign language, history) met daily, but electives met only 2-3 times per week. (We were allowed to have a few free periods a week -- not every block had to have a class.)
Comparing this to my (then) local public school's 6 periods a day, and with every class running all week, taking non-core classes (eg, choir, PE, etc.) was far more of a commitment than at my school.
Our model also meant that we could double-up -- for example, we couldn't take "just" AP English Lit -- we had to take the standard 11th or 12th grade lit class PLUS AP English Lit. (Some of them weren't full-doubled classes -- AP American History, for example, was the same lecture as the required 11th grade American History class with extra periods of discussion and writing.) PE is also a bit of a special case -- while we had PE classes in middle school a few times a week, in high school you got PE credit either for team sports with after school practice (no cuts), or you could submit a program for credit. I took yoga and water aerobics classes one semester. :-)
Note to self: pay attention to scheduling models when looking at middle/high schools. The ability to arrange course time by importance is really useful.
-m
The pop quiz needed one more selection:
ReplyDeletee) surfing the internet and emailing their friends.
Jo Anne C
"Students synthesize and construct knowledge to help them actively grapple with the complexities of the problem and develop strategies to direct their own learning."
ReplyDeleteMore like the school skims off the cream of the crop, hopes they teach themselves, and claims responsibility for any progress the students made--despite the school.
In fact, many vocational schools also offer degrees (not engineering), and some are very well regarded.
ReplyDeleteJust getting to this (thanks, all!) -- this is what I was wondering.
What are the good technical degrees offered by vocational schools?
I don't know this realm at all.
Where do you put things like air conditioning repair?
Is that considered technical?
My other question is: does this program work as true voc ed?
In other words, would you be prepared for a good job coming out of this program and not continuing to college or vocational school?
e) surfing the internet and emailing their friends.
ReplyDeletelollll
that's for sure ----
Note to self: pay attention to scheduling models when looking at middle/high schools. The ability to arrange course time by importance is really useful.
ReplyDeleteFollow-up note to self: flexible scheduling is code for middle school model.
In public schools, that is.
ReplyDeleteMy mates at engineering school who had done their technical work first (what was then called the New Zealand Certificate of Engineering) said that the main difference was that in the polytech they were given a formula and told how to use it, in the uni course we were expected to derive the formula.
ReplyDeleteSo still lots of algebra in the vocational stuff, at least in the NZ system. And you could get a good job with the NZCE.