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Table 9 Responses to interview questions about preparation experiences to teach engineering and interwoven science concepts

From: Engineering pedagogical content knowledge: examining correlations with formal and informal preparation experiences

Teacher

Response

T1

Science in terms of what I’ve taken in college in graduate or undergraduate courses, I think it would’ve been enough to understand what I’m dealing with. Helping with the Science Olympiad was a lot of fun and a big learning experience. In some respects it helped me learn more about science because I can take the activities that they do and kind of bend them to give them more of an engineering feel

T2

I’d have to take it back to physics in 12th grade. I had two great teachers. That’s where the majority of it came from

T3

I feel like at my teacher preparation institution we didn’t spend a lot of time on science. It was like we took a science course and that was it. We didn’t focus as much on all of the different aspects like STEM, science, and everything. Most of our time with the engineering part was spent actually building things

T4

I haven’t had as many biology courses, but I guess I’ve had as many chemistry, physics, and math courses as the physics, chemistry, and math teachers have for their content area

T5

The fact that I was able to get instruction not from an engineering education instructor, but I got my engineering from engineering professors, my science from science professors, my math from math professors, and my technology from industrial technology professors was huge. I recognize truly what science is. I believe that I understand science and technology sometimes better than what science teachers do and engineering teachers do because there are a whole lot of science teachers trying to move into the engineering area to make their activities engaging when they need to make science more engaging. At the same time, how to organize your labs, how to really use inquiry, their theory, their practices, the technical know-how for different disciplines is really important, but appreciation for where it’s applied is most important because there's a lot of people in those fields that don’t know how it's applied

T6

I should've taken physics which I never took in high school. So if I were to go back to do anything like that I probably would go back and take a physics course to become a little bit more familiar with some of those concepts. FoTE is much more applied physics based as opposed to biology

T7

My preparation in FoTE comes from being a trainer quite honestly, and teaching other teachers this course and actually working with writing and adapting this course. Applying math and science and beginning to understand the relationships between the activities are definitely an important part. I understand the objective of applying math and science to engineering and getting your students to understand it. I’ve always seen engineering education’s main goal is to get students to apply what they’re learning in math and science, and even language arts classes in a real concrete way so that it sticks with them and they’re ready for the career world

T8

Definitely the physics I've taken. I took it in high school. I didn’t take any in college, I took all biology in college. I think taking physics courses in college would’ve definitely helped and I don’t know how much physics we covered at the FoTE training that I went to. Our physics teacher is pretty involved so I can go to him for anything