Now and again, we stumble into illuminating moments where the work we do in one area, causes us to ponder and perhaps even think differently about our work in another.For me, just such a connection took hold between my work in curriculum reform and my work in Design & Technology education.It involves the work of Lawrence Stenhouse, and in particular, his idea dating back to the mid-1970s that education happens through engagement in worthwhile activities and processes.I have come to recognize Stenhouse as an ambitious and insightful educational thinker, but he was never (to the best of my knowledge) directly involved with Design & Technology Education.I would therefore like to begin by sharing a little about who he was and briefly highlight some of his ideas.I will then consider the idea of worthwhileness in relation to Design & Technology and offer a tentative (and necessarily partial) exploration of worthwhileness related to learning in woodwork.My hope in doing so is that others might reflect upon this idea and what it means for their own thinking and practice.Born in England and with Scottish parents, Lawrence Stenhouse was a teacher educator and noted educational thinker who developed a keen interest in curriculum studies early on in his career.This interest became his passion.It was spurred in no small part by the idea of the teacher as researcher and a desire to explore how schooling could better engage marginalized groups of pupils.Humes (2024), who writes insightfully about Stenhouse, notes his significance as a "creative and original thinker, with a body of work that broke new ground not only in the field of curriculum development, but in a range of related

The use of adaptive comparative judgement (ACJ) for assessment in technology education has been topical since its introduction to the field through the e-scape project coordinated by the Technology Education Research Unit in the United Kingdom. In the last decade, however, there has been an increasing volume of research examining how ACJ can and should be used in the technology classroom. This research has grown in volume to the point where there are now systematic reviews being conducted on the topic. There is a limitation in the use of ACJ within the field in that there does not exist an open-source tool to facilitate its widespread interrogation. Existing proprietary solutions exist and offer exceptional functionality and user experience, but they cannot be easily responsive to needs within the technology education community because they serve a much wider audience, and they cannot be easily used to experiment on algorithm optimization as to do so would be costly. In response to this need, an ACJ shinyapp has been developed. It is presented in this article from a technical perspective with a view that this description can afford needed transparency in the use of ACJ and that having such a tool now permits more systematic investigation into the impactful pedagogical usage of ACJ.

The Journal of Technology Education is an international platform for scholarly discussion intended to advance thinking on technology and engineering education philosophy, theory, and practice. To this end, the journal publishes peer-reviewed research, theoretical, and positional articles addressing topics related to the PK-12 curricular area of technology and engineering education (T&EE), and its teacher education. The implementation of PK-12 T&EE promotes learning of both content and practice through student engagement in minds-on/hands-on, design based, problem-solving experiences. T&EE is a subject area fostering technological and engineering literacy where students learn about the full range of technologies from material processing, energy, biotechnologies, and robotics to construction, transportation, communications, electronics, and computational technologies. As a PK-12 curricular area, T&EE is intended for all students, regardless of their future career aspirations.

The Journal of Technology Education (JTE) provides an international forum for scholarship on topics directly related to technology and engineering education, inclusive of the practices and designerly ways of knowing inherent to technological and engineering literacy. Manuscripts should focus on technology and engineering education research, philosophy, theory, or practice. In addition, the Journal publishes book reviews, editorials, guest articles, comprehensive literature reviews, and reactions to previously published articles.

Academic standards in the United States advocate for the integration of science, and technology and engineering (T&E) content and practices within the elementary grades (ITEEA, 2020; NGSS Lead States, 2013). However, elementary educators often receive limited preparation for developing and facilitating safer hands-on science and T&E learning experiences (Love, 2017a), which can contribute to their reluctance to integrate science and T&E instruction. This study addresses the issue by examining changes in elementary pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) views toward safety and perceived preparation to safely infuse design-based science and T&E instruction following participation in an integrative science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education (Wells & Ernst, 2015) methods course. A cohort of 27 elementary PSTs were split into two class sections. The control group participated in a safety jigsaw lesson the first day of classes, whereas the experiment group participated in a safety warm-up activity at the beginning of every class throughout the 15-week semester. Findings indicate all participants reported significant gains in self-efficacy and expected outcomes toward safety, views about the percentage of time elementary integrative STEM lessons should include hands-on learning experiences, perceived knowledge of integrative STEM safety concepts, and perceived ability to safely teach integrative STEM lessons. Further analyses revealed no significant differences between the two class sections. Results suggest that, in addition to emphasizing and demonstrating required safety protocols before any activity, varying strategies used to embed safety instruction in methods courses can significantly increase elementary PSTs’ views toward safety in integrative STEM education.

n/a

American preservice teachers are routinely introduced to educational philosophies positing that all students can learn (Edmonds, 1981) and that a culturally responsive approach considering students’ knowledge and experiences is tantamount (Gay, 2018). The atmosphere in many American public schools, however, reflects far less cultural responsiveness and faith in students’ abilities than one would anticipate (Bonner et al., 2018). In these schools, teaching to the test is a practical necessity (Volante, 2004), students are sorted into tracks based on perceived potential (Meyer, 1977), and curriculum design is restricted by state and local standards (Spillane, 2004). Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn (2020) by Sanjay Sarma with Luke Yoquinto offers teachers, school administrators, and educational policy-makers a historical analysis of how this situation came to exist and a review of the latest research on cognitive science relevant to education. The book also presents a refreshing proposal to alter the status quo. Sarma, who leads MIT’s Open Learning program, is well experienced with novel approaches to curriculum design and implementing radical ideas to reach diverse student bodies. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the science of learning or a modern approach to educational policy.

This study compared students’ expectations, perceptions, and grades in two undergraduate technology management courses at a university in the United States. One course was a technical course taught by a single instructor in an online course section and in a face-to-face section, and the second was a nontechnical course taught by a different instructor in an online and in a face-to-face section. Different concerns were evident between online and face-to-face students and between those in a technical or nontechnical section of a course. For the technical course sections, grades were higher in the online section.

This study looks at Purdue University's Integrated First-Year Experience of Design Thinking in Technology, Fundamentals of Speech Communication, and First-Year Composition and its effects on oral communication. We examined whether this three-course integration inspired by writing-across-the-curriculum and communication-across-the-curriculum would lead students to develop more effective oral communication skills than a nonintegrated course. Frameworks for 21st century skills and the National Association of Colleges and Employers (2017) have pinpointed the importance of oral and written communication skills and initiatives. Still, research has produced mixed results on how well universities are preparing students for the workplace. Our study investigated whether the integrated program had better end-of-semester group oral presentations than student groups enrolled only in our Design Thinking in Technology course. A quasi-experimental design and post-only analysis revealed that integrated sections had more effective oral presentations than the nonintegrated sections

Scholarly Communication is located on the fourth floor of Carol M. Newman Library at Virginia Tech. Scholarly Communication is a dynamic landscape, and we are continually evolving. Many scholarly communications activities have spun-off into their own departments, such as VT Publishing and Digital Imaging and Preservation Services, and Digital Library Development. Our focus is on supporting the creation and dissemination of scholarship.