The 2015 NSTA national conference wrapped up last weekend in Chicago. One timely conference strand was “Student Learning—How Do We Know What They Know?”

STEM assessment is a hot topic. The Next Generation Science Standards have created a demand for a new kind of assessment; meanwhile, President Obama’s proposed 2015 budget would support more effective evaluation of the outcomes of federal STEM programs. But right now there’s no widely accepted approach for monitoring and measuring the “three-dimensional learning” NGSS is designed to support—where 1) the core ideas within each science discipline are connected to 2) the practices that real scientists and engineers use in their work through what NGSS calls 3) “cross-cutting concepts.”)

The National Science Teachers Association holds its annual national conference later this week in Chicago, IL, and one conference strand will be “Teaching Every Child by Embracing Diversity.” The goal is to help educators find new ideas and new resources for science teaching that meet the needs of all students.

For the past two years Dr. Heidi Carlone, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina - Greensboro School of Education, has been studying equity and access in classrooms, using EiE as a curricular tool. We checked in with her for a progress report.

In college I had a biology professor who insisted you don’t need fancy lab instruments to do real research, just duct tape and baling wire. He challenged us to make our own research tools, and the results were pretty creative: one classmate who wanted to compare the toughness of different tree leaves made a “puncture-o-meter” out of rubber bands and a sharpened paper clip.

Young children love this kind of tinkering and problem solving. Check the EiE Video Snippet below to see the creative ways one group of first graders solved the design challenge from the EiE unit “Best of Bugs,” using materials like pipe cleaners and pompoms to engineer a device for pollinating flowers by hand.

So he probably felt quite at home today as he joined 22 third graders at Maury Elementary School in Washington, DC to work on an activity from the Engineering is Elementary® (EiE®) unit “A Slick Solution: Cleaning an Oil Spill.”

February has a lot to celebrate: National Heart Month, National Safe Boating Week, National Tortilla Chip Day, and George Washington’s birthday –which kicks off National Engineers Week.

The latter two holidays fall together by design, not by coincidence. Our nation’s first president was also an engineer. Trained as a surveyor and highly aware of the role of engineering in successful military campaigns, Washington designed many things to make life on his country estate more comfortable and efficient, including a combination plow and seed-planter and a two-story circular barn that worked as a giant, horse-powered threshing machine.