Virtual reality (VR) can promote design performance, and may generate a high cognitive load and affect creative design thinking as well. In order to examine the effect of VR application on cognitive load and engineering design creativity, this study recruited 81 eighth-grade students as participants and employed a non-equivalent-groups…

Project Lead the Way (PLTW) is a hands-on, project-based engineering curriculum for high school and middle school students, which has quadrupled annual enrollment in Texas in five years to over 23,000 students. The diversity of students participating has also increased dramatically. Using six years of longitudinally-linked student data, the…

This longitudinal study analyzes survey responses in seventh, eighth, and ninth grade from diverse public school students (n = 482) to explore gender differences in engineering and science career preferences. Females were far more likely to express interest in a science career (31%) than an engineering career (13%), while the reverse was true for…

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…

The Second International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM2009) was held at the University of Cordoba, Spain, on July 1-3, 2009. EDM brings together researchers from computer science, education, psychology, psychometrics, and statistics to analyze large data sets to answer educational research questions. The increase in instrumented…