Teaching engineering in K-12 grades would not only boost interest in the profession and in technical careers in general, but would also improve all students’ problem-solving, systems-thinking and teamwork skills, says the National Academy of Engineering in a Sept. 8 report. Even so, very few U.S. schools now include the discipline or have enough trained faculty to teach it. Says NAE: “Engineering might be called the missing letter in STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] education.”
The study, the first in-depth analysis of K-12 engineering education in the U.S., was largely sponsored by Stephen D. Bechtel Jr., retired chairman of Bechtel Group Inc., San Francisco. Acknowledging the sparse data, NAE believes about 6 million students have been “exposed” to engineering instruction since the early 1990s, but that number is a small fraction of the K-12 population in the U.S., about 56 million in 2008.