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Rural economically disadvantaged communities face unique challenges in engaging students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). School district administrators, teachers, and students do not have access to high-quality STEM opportunities compared to urban schools. This article describes a partnership between a small, private STEM university and a network of school districts scattered across the geographically isolated region of upstate New York. The partnership’s primary goal is to support the teaching and learning of STEM. This is achieved through actively engaging a range of university and community stakeholders in STEM enrichment and professional development. Programming includes summer camps and after-school activities, challenges and competitions that focus on inspiring students to pursue STEM careers, undergraduate and graduate student mentors, and a university curriculum designed to prepare teachers to work in high-need school districts. Activities are supported by the university’s Institute for STEM Education, which fosters collaborations for like-minded faculty and campus members to pursue grant opportunities and connect with community members. The paper describes various program components and how they work to support each other, discusses impacts of the program, and describes ways in which elements can be implemented elsewhere.

Engineering graduates must be prepared to support our world’s need for a clean and sustainable energy future. Complex problems related to energy and sustainability require engineers to consider the broad spectrum of interrelated consequences including human and environmental health, sociopolitical, and economic factors. Teaching engineering students about energy within a societal context, simultaneous with developing technical knowledge and skills, will better prepare them to solve real-world problems. Yet few energy courses that approach energy topics from a human-centered perspective exist within engineering programs. Engineering students enrolled in energy programs often take such courses as supplemental to their course of study. This paper presents an engineering course that approaches energy education from a socio-technical perspective, emphasizing the complex interactions of energy technologies with sustainability dimensions. Course content and learning activities are structured around learning outcomes that require students to gain technical knowledge as well as an understanding of broader energy-related impacts. The course attracts students from a variety of majors and grade levels. A mixed quantitative/qualitative assessment conducted from 2019–2021 indicates successful achievement of course learning outcomes. Students demonstrated significant gains in technical content knowledge as well as the ability to critically address complex sociotechnical issues related to current and future energy systems.

Engineers must take a leading role in addressing the challenges of mitigating climate change and adapting to the inevitable changes that our world is facing. To improve climate literacy, technical education must include problem formulation and solutions that consider complex interactions between engineered, Earth, and societal systems, including trade-offs among benefits, costs, and risks. Improving engineering students’ climate literacy must also inspire students’ motivation to work toward climate solutions. This paper highlights the content and pedagogical approach used in a class for engineering students that helped contribute to significant gains in engineering students’ climate literacy and critical thinking competencies. A total of 89 students fully participated in a pre/post climate literacy questionnaire over four years of study. As a whole, students demonstrated significant gains in climate-related content knowledge, affect, and behavior. Substantial differences were observed between students in different engineering disciplines and male vs. female students. Assessment of critical thinking showed that students did an excellent job formulating problem statements and solutions in a manner that incorporated a multidimensional systems perspective. These skills are critical for students to address climate change effectively in their eventual professions.

Project-based climate change instructional modules were developed and used in middle and high school classrooms. The modules were created to develop higher-order thinking skills with real-world data and models describing climate systems and approaches to mitigate or adapt to changes. The objective of this paper is to identify the relationships between specific attributes of the project-based climate modules used in classrooms and resulting gains in middle and high school students' climate literacy. Modules were assessed to define the level of rigor and relevance associated with the learning activities. A climate literacy questionnaire that included cognitive, affective (including self-efficacy), and behavioral items was administered to students before and after the modules were taught. Overall, students made modest but statistically significant gains on the cognitive (p ≪ 0.001) and the affective (p < 0.01) climate literacy subscales. Results of the fixed effects analysis of covariance showed a s...

Energy literacy is a broad term encompassing content knowledge as well as a citizenship understanding of energy that includes affective and behavioral aspects. This article presents explicit criteria that will serve as a foundation for developing measurable objectives for energy literacy in three dimensions: cognitive (knowledge, cognitive skills), affective (attitude, values, personal responsibility); and behavioral. The outcome of this research is a framework from which a quantitative survey of energy literacy for secondary students in New York State, United States, can be created. Efforts supported by this research may help assess the broader impacts of educational programs in terms of their effectiveness for improving students’ energy literacy.

A measurement scale has been developed to assess secondary students’ energy literacy—a citizenship understanding of energy that includes cognitive as well as affective and behavioral items. Instrument development procedures followed psychometric principles from educational and social psychology research. Initial exploration of the measure yielded promising results: internal consistencies for the cognitive, affective, and behavioral subscales, measured by Cronbach's α, ranged from 0.75 to 0.83; average discrimination indices ranged from 0.27 to 0.46. The instrument's validity was supported with contrasted-groups and developmental-age progression comparisons, as well as factor analyses. The energy literacy questionnaire provides an opportunity to measure baseline levels of energy literacy and to assess broader impacts of educational interventions.

With high networking connectivity and low-cost, high-grade sensors, production environments continue to collect abundant amounts of process data. While data acquisition and archiving systems are exceptional at collecting and storing time series data from disparate sources, the raw data from these systems are rarely presented in a format that is directly meaningful for end users. Decision makers often require to combine, interpolate, and transform the otherwise uninformative raw data in order to bring context and meaning to them. To this end, this paper presents the design and integration of an automated data calculation engine with an existing web-based data acquisition and visualization system called CLICS. At the core of the engine is an expression language for the specification of transformation/calculation formulae over time series data. With the calculation engine, a user can interactively specify a formula to transform multiple existing time series to create a new one that is significantly easier to understand and manipulate, or calculate a single value using a formula. To illustrate the communicative power of the engine, specific case examples are presented relating to three interconnected facilities (a greenhouse, a food waste digester, and an energy cabin) that are designed for conducting research and educational activities in energy efficiency and environmental sustainability on a university campus.

Classroom units were developed for high-school environmental science and college industrial ecology classes to introduce life- cycle perspectives and systems analysis of transportation fuel/vehicle systems. The units at both levels emphasize the need to consider energy and environmental issues related to the nation's transportation sector that extend well beyond the gasoline pump and vehicle emissions. The units include several lessons to introduce environmental issues, understand the fuel and vehicle technologies (high-school level only), and conceptually and quantitatively evaluate differences among the expected future fuels through a life-cycle assessment. The quantitative assess- ment of the high-school students shows that the units helped students to significantly raise their energy knowledge and change their attitudes. Anecdotal information from the students indicates that the increased awareness about the seriousness of energy issues has caused them to be more conservative and conscientious about their energy consumption behaviors. The evaluation of the class in the 2009-2010 academic year (AY09) was excellent, suggesting that the addition of the life-cycle assessment activities described in this paper were well received by the students. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)EI.1943-5541.0000059. © 2011 American Society of Civil Engineers. CE Database subject headings: Engineering education; Energy consumption; Energy efficiency; Energy sources; Transportation management; Life cycles; Sustainable development; Students; Undergraduate study.

Energy literacy, which encompasses broad content knowledge as well as affective and behavioral characteristics, will empower people to make appropriate energy-related choices and embrace changes in the way we harness and consume energy. Energy literacy was measured with a written questionnaire completed by 3708 secondary students in New York State, USA. Results indicate that students are concerned about energy problems (affective subscale mean 73% of the maximum attainable score), yet relatively low cognitive (42% correct) and behavioral (65% of the maximum) scores suggest that students may lack the knowledge and skills they need to effectively contribute toward solutions. High school (HS) students scored significantly better than middle school (MS) students on the cognitive subscale; gains were greatest on topics included in NY State educational standards, and less on topics related to “practical” energy knowledge such as ways to save energy. Despite knowledge gains, there was a significant drop in energy conservation behavior between the MS and HS students. Intercorrelations between groups of questions indicate energy-related behaviors are more strongly related to affect than to knowledge. These findings underscore the need for education that improves energy literacy by impacting student attitudes, values and behaviors, as well as broad content knowledge.

Engineering and Society, a course designed for first-year engineering (FYE) students and non-majors, was introduced in spring 2011 and most recently (F2014) became part of the required FYE core curricula. In addition to traditional elements of an FYE course such as the study of engineering disciplines and a team-based design project, students explore the various ways non-technical factors influence the development and integration of technology within our society, aligning with many of the learning outcomes specified by ABET General Criterion 3. Student outcomes were measured with a relatively simple pre-test/post-test study that uses a self-constructed on-line survey. Relative to the control group, students who enrolled in the course showed significantly greater gains in self-confidence, most notably with respect to engineering problem solving and design; sense of fit within the engineering profession; and understanding of the broad nature of engineering, including the importance of creativity, ethics, and societal influences to engineering design and decision making. Changes in academic self-confidence and satisfaction with the decision to study engineering were somewhat mixed, yet students in the course expressed a significant increase in their confidence of remaining in an engineering major throughout college, while students in the control group expressed a slight but not significant decline.

Iron salts are effective in controlling sulfide odors produced by sludge blanket samples of a facultative waste treatment lagoon receiving concentrated sulfite waste from a pulp and paper ...

Addressing individual and household energy consumption behavior will require that we assess public understanding of energy. Despite this logic, there is scant social science evidence regarding current public understanding of energy in the United States. We began to address this deficit with a web-based survey to assess Americans’ perceived and actual knowledge related to energy. We interviewed a nationally representative sample of respondents (N = 816) from Knowledge Networks’ KnowledgePanel in fall 2011. Rather than attempting to assess a single, all-encompassing indicator, we pursued a constellation of specific measures that reflect the range of energy information interpretation tasks people engage in on a daily basis. This decision reflects our claim that public understanding of energy is multifaceted and might be operationalized in several ways that will not perfectly co-vary. Specifically, we measured three concepts: perceived understanding of energy, demonstrated energy knowledge, and the ability to interpret an energy bill. Results suggest that public understanding of energy is multifaceted; perceived understanding is not directly equivalent to actual understanding in many cases. Moreover, a range of factors predicted each of our outcome variables. Results of our work have implications for future policy and intervention.

Energy literacy was measured among a sample of middle school students (n=865) before (pre) and after (post) their middle-level physical science course using a written quantitative questionnaire developed for this research. Overall, students demonstrated significant cognitive gains, with no significant change in their energy-related affect, self-efficacy, or behavior scores. A sub-set of students who participated in project-based energy curricula demonstrated greater cognitive gains, particularly on items that related to topics that were more practical and related to everyday life. One group of project-oriented students who were academically challenged demonstrated significant gains on every non-cognitive subscale score. Qualitative outcomes indicate that most project-oriented students thought more about their energy consumption and made a greater effort to conserve energy, after studying energy in school. They also reportedly talked more with their families about saving energy, felt more strongly about saving energy, developing and using renewable energy resources. The findings underscore the complex relationship between knowledge, affect, and behavior, confirming that energy-related behaviors are more strongly related to affect than to knowledge, and support the benefits of project-based instruction for improving students' broad energy literacy.

Energy education programs are making their way into today's K-12 classroom. Effective programs that improve energy literacy will help draw students toward further studies and careers in the growing fields of energy-related engineering, science, and technology, and will prepare all students to interpret energy issues and make sound choices as they become adults. This work evaluates different types of educational experiences in terms of their ability to improve students' energy literacy. Study participants are exposed to a variety of classroom experiences, with respect to rigorous and relevant teaching strategies and the approach to covering energy issues. The analysis uses a triangulated, mixed-methods design, including a pre/post quantitative survey in addition to post-program questionnaires that provide a deeper understanding of the students' perceptions of the impact their education has had on their energy-related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors.

An energy literacy survey for middle and high school students has been developed according to established psychometric principles and methodologies. The survey measures energy-related knowledge, attitudes and behaviors and is correlated to established benchmarks that define energy literacy as determined by a panel of energy- and energy-education specialists. Results from a pilot of the survey among 955 New York State students indicate low levels of energy-related knowledge, with fewer than 1% of the students scoring above 80%. Attitude and behavior scores are slightly better, suggesting that while students may recognize the existence of an energy problem, they generally lack the knowledge and capabilities to effectively contribute toward a solution. Results support the need for development and implementation of energy education programs as part of the regular school curriculum.

An energy education program that embeds energy topics within a societal context that is meaningful to students may improve energy literacy and effectively prepare students to interpret energy issues and make sound actions and choices as voters, consumers, and professionals. High school environmental science students participate in a project-based energy module where they explore technical, environmental, societal, and economic concerns related to the production, delivery, and use of hydrogen fuel and fuel cells for transportation. In-depth assessment evaluates the course's impact on students' energy-related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors, as well as their feelings of general self-efficacy. The analysis uses a triangulated mixed-methods design, including pre/post written questionnaires, classroom observations, post-program focus group interviews, and post-program opinion surveys.

Faculty and students at Clarkson University have developed a 10-week unit for middle school students to increase their awareness and aptitude for engineering. The unit, entitled "engineering for the environment", challenges students to reduce solid waste from their community by reusing the waste in the form of a valuable material. Science, engineering and math are integrated to help students learn to transform biodegradable materials into compost and to incorporate non-biodegradable materials as an aggregate in concrete. This unit shows young students that there is a wide diversity in the nature of work done by engineers, and that engineers can indeed help the environment and society - messages that are particularly important for young girls. The engineering for the environment curriculum is incorporated into project lead the way's middle school curriculum to balance existing units that focus on mechanical and electrical aspects of engineering.