Project Activities
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Products and publications
Product: Through prior IES-funded SBIR projects in 2016 and 2017, the developer created an online platform, Future Engineers, to administer educational challenges for students in or outside of K-12 classrooms. This project will develop a new portal for adult judges to evaluate and provide written feedback to students in response to their submissions and an interface for students to safely engage with mentors to facilitate an iterative process to refine and improve the submission. The website will require educator or parent approval for student involvement, and will generate additional teacher-assigned class awards, superlatives, or badges that get displayed in the gallery to provide more acknowledgment.
Supplemental information
In Phase II, the team will fully develop the portal and will make iterative refinements based on feedback from students, judges, and educators at major production milestones. After development is complete, researchers will conduct a pilot study with 44 middle school classrooms (15 per treatment condition) with approximately 25 students per classroom (for a total of 1100 students) to test the feasibility, usability, fidelity of implementation, and the promise of the new portal to support outcomes. All classes will participate in a student challenge, half will receive feedback from judges, and half will not. Researchers will examine changes in students' perceptions of their ability to be successful with challenges using items from the Competency Beliefs in STEM measure, and a researcher developed measure for engagement in learning.
Questions about this project?
To answer additional questions about this project or provide feedback, please contact the program officer.
