A Comparison of Two Engineering Outreach Programs for Adolescents

There is continued growth and development of outreach programs designed to increase pre-college students’ awareness and understanding of engineering as a profession and as a career. These outreach programs vary in format and in the groups targeted for participation but maintain the same fundamental goal of increasing participant knowledge of engineering. Many of these outreach programs also maintain the implicit goal of increasing the participants’ knowledge and attitudes toward college. The additional resources and funding that are commonly allocated to support outreach programs frequently involve documenting accountability which motivates evaluation of program impact. Therefore, many outreach events include program evaluation to assess impact on the pre-college participants’ knowledge and perceptions of Louis S. Nadelson and Janet Callahan Boise State University Engineering Outreach Programs for Adolescents Research on the perceptions of engineering commonly held by children and adults reveals limited understanding or misconceptions of the profession [17]. Because children are essential to the future of the profession, their limited knowledge and misconception of engineering are of particular concern [17]. Efforts to increase children’s knowledge and resolve their misconceptions of engineering could take place in the classroom as part of the K-12 curriculum. However, this may be hindered by the likelihood that teachers may potentially hold the same limited understanding and misconceptions of engineering as the general public [16], [9]. This condition is exacerbated by the lack of teacher experience with authentic research or engineering endeavors. The likelihood that teachers hold limited knowledge of and have limited experience with engineering provides justification for pursuing other options for increasing the understanding of engineering in children. Recognizing the possibility that teachers have limited preparation for effectively increasing their students’ understanding of engineering, many colleges of engineering are taking action. Numerous engineering schools and colleges are developing and offering engineering education outreach programs as a method for increasing pre-college students’ knowledge of the profession [9]. Jeffers and colleagues report on the widespread offering of engineering outreach programs, on the diversity of forms these programs can take, and on the broad spectrum of students the endeavors may serve. The growing popularity and increasing amount of resources being allocated to implement engineering outreach programs has motivated program accountability mandates. This has led to a rising expectation that colleges of engineering will evaluate their outreach programs to gather the data required to empirically document program effectiveness. It is anticipated that program evaluation of engineering outreach endeavors will determine the extent to engineering, but they have not included the assessment of program impact on college attitudes. In this outreach program evaluation study, we examined the impact of two residential engineering outreach events on the participants’ engineering perceptions and attitudes and their college attitudes. Our results indicate a number of personal variables were predictors of college attitude, but we failed to expose any variables as indicators of engineering perceptions and attitudes. Analysis of the pre-post survey scores revealed a significant change in engineering perceptions and attitudes (p < .01), but no significant change in college attitude (p =.07). We also exposed a differential impact by outreach event. Results, implications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed. which these endeavors are increasing student knowledge of engineering and meeting other program related goals. The expectation that outreach programs undergo evaluation motivated our research. In this project we investigated the impact of two engineering outreach residential programs designed for pre-college teens. Of foremost interest was the influence of the outreach programs on the participating adolescents’ perceptions and attitudes toward engineering, which was the primary goal and content of these two events. Although previous research on outreach program effectiveness for increasing adolescent participants’ knowledge of engineering has been reported in the literature, the wide variations in the content, format and audience for these endeavors justifies continued research in this area. However, there is a gap in the literature regarding the impact of outreach programs on the participating adolescents’ attitudes toward engineering, making our research