ATE (Advanced Technological Education, one of the NSF education programs) is different!

For one thing, their audience is different: two-year community colleges and secondary “vocational” schools. A far cry from the Caltechs and MITs that NSF normally hobnobs with.

Still, as I found at my their meeting last week, ATE is far from “NSF Lite.” For one thing, in contrast to the rest of the science ed programs, ATE’s goal is not to prepare their students for the next run of the academic ladder – for the most part, the graduates from ATE-funded programs, go straight into the high tech job market, where they will work as technicians, lab assistants, or network administrators. This means that the program is driven, for better or worse, by external market forces, and is correspondingly insulated from some of the kookier pendulum swings of educational policy.

This leads, among other things, to a refreshing concern with bringing course materials up to date. While the “academic” educators tweak a curriculum that considers Mendel’s Laws (1866) synonymous with genetics, and relegates Relativity (1905) to the chapter on “modern” physics that never gets covered, ATE is busy funding initiatives on hybrid cars, nanotechnology, renewable energy sources, and biotechnology!

Our CAPA project, of course, is about none of those things – we are the only project in the portfolio, in fact, that deals with assessment, rather than content. But there again, I’m finding the ATE community ahead of the curve. Performance assessment (inferring kids’ understanding by their manipulations of models, rather than their answers to questions) has been something of a hard sell to the more academic programs of NSF (to say nothing of the Department of Education!) In contrast, the community colleges and technical high schools recognize that not everyone “tests well” on multiple-choice items – their clientele, in fact, comprises a disproportionate number of intuitive problem-solvers who are “good with their hands” but score poorly on tasks requiring abstractions and the extensive use of language. I talked to a lot of people at the meeting, and when I explained why I was there everyone “got it.” I collected a lot of business cards.

It was a peculiar feeling to attend a PI meeting where the only familiar faces, aside from NSF folks, belonged to my co-PI John Chamberlain of CORD, and Bob Tinker and Amy Pallant, who were there representing the Molit project (you should have seen Amy’s hotel suite – ask her about it sometime!), But was a more exciting meeting than the ones I’m used to, and I’m already looking forward to next year’s.