Educators understand that the current assessment-based standards are not going away anytime soon. Performance based assessments (PBAs) are an effective way of determining the level of student learning that has occurred in a lesson. While some multiple-choice tests tend to only assess the memorization of factual knowledge, PBAs focus on…

Engineers are faced with solving important problems every day and must follow a step-by-step design process to arrive at solutions. Students who are taught an effective design process to apply to engineering projects begin to see problems as an engineer would, consider all ideas, and arrive at the best solution. Using an effective design process…

The interdisciplinary approach that science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) projects inspire in both teachers and students "brings to light a larger picture that promotes real-world scientific applications, which has in turn been shown to increase undergraduate persistence in STEM." The high school students have been…