Analyzing K-12 Education as a Complex System

This 11-page paper, provided by the American Society for Engineering Education, discusses the creation of an innovative framework from the Advanced Manufacturing and Prototyping Integrated to Unlock Potential (AMP-IT-UP) NSF Math/Science Partnership at the Georgia Institute of Technology. This framework is rooted within the field of industrial and systems engineering and examines barriers and enablers to K-12 school change and reform. This paper describes "the first step in creating this framework, namely identifying the agents within K-12 education and the attributes of these agents that are critical to educational change." A sample scale for describing these attributes is also discussed.

Sections of this paper include the following: Introduction, Using Industrial and Systems Engineering to Model Complex Systems, The Basic Components of the Model, Assessing Attributes, and Conclusions and Future Work.