A Forum on Characterizing the Impact and Difusion of Engineering Education Innovations

National Academy Of Sciences, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

The project is supporting the organization and implementation of a one and one-half day forum to consider the important, yet underexplored issue of characterizing reasonable expectations for change and transformation within the engineering education community and have implications for the STEM education community as a whole. The project is seeking to answer the following questions: (1) What were the critical (human, organizational, resource, etc.) factors that led to successful innovation? (2) What intermediate metrics provide indication of short-, mid-, and long-range success (educational impact) in innovation? (3) What broad strategies emerge from the examples by which to pursue transformative education innovations? (4) What were the critical (human, organizational, resource, etc.) factors that led to successful diffusion? (5) What intermediate metrics provide indication of short-, mid-, and long-range success (educational impact) in diffusion? (6) What broad strategies emerge from the examples by which to pursue diffusion of transformative education innovations? The twenty-five attendees are broadly representative of diverse individual and institutional perspectives and constituencies in engineering education including former NSF rotators, engineering educators, social science and education researchers, administrators, program evaluation experts, and change management scholars. They are drawing on comparisons of successful and less successful examples of transformative educational innovations and their diffusion (dissemination and use), as well as commissioned white papers.