Identifying Implications: Using Personas to Bridge the Gap between Research Findings and the Design of Educational Experiences

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

The gap between our understanding of how engineering students learn and current practices in engineering education continues to grow. Personas are tools from the field of user-centered design that hold promise for helping engineering educators use the growing body of research findings to improve the design of educational experiences. Based on promising preliminary work, this project at the University of Washington uses personas as the basis for two interventions: educator workshops and educator design sessions. This project focuses on how educators leverage the personas in each of the interventions. This rigorous study of a new faculty development approach helps to transfer important research findings into the minds and hands of those who can make the best use of them - engineering faculty, staff, and students. The PIs take a design experiment approach featuring multiple iterations, ongoing analysis, and documentation of the activities. The team includes a seasoned faculty developer, an internationally recognized researcher of the engineering student experience, and a researcher who has studied both the engineering student experience and the thinking processes of engineering educators. This research has the potential to be transformative through accelerating the rate at which research on engineering student learning influences teaching and learning practices. By helping engineering faculty, policy-makers, and academic support staff to make better use of educational research, including important research on the experiences of under-represented students, this project is improving these experiences and the quality of engineering education more broadly. The results of this study will be an adaptive persona model, useful in conveying engineering education research results to engineering faculty.