Research Initiation: The Impact of Engineering Education Guilds - Understanding Vision, Quantifying Propagation, and Situating Among Other Faculty Resources

Rowan University, Glassboro NJ

Investigators

Abstract

The National Science Foundation and other organizations have spent, and will continue to spend, millions of dollars each year supporting educational innovation projects to broaden participation, improve student learning, and positively impact undergraduate engineering students. However, for various reasons, many of these educational innovations are never implemented beyond the classrooms they were initially designed for. In an attempt to improve the likelihood that educational innovations will be widely used, this research examines ways in which educators develop, share, and implement new ways of teaching. In particular, this project focuses on educational innovations that are shared through "engineering education guilds," which are large groups of faculty who are organized around a specific innovation (for example, the use of reflection in engineering education). The goals of this research are to understand (1) how the innovations championed by two well-established guilds were designed to be easily adopted by educators and (2) what resources educators use when adopting new ways of teaching, including the guild's role in that adoption. If these goals are met, designers and users of educational innovations will be better informed and supported in educational change development and adoption, ultimately leading to an increase in the adoption of research-based classroom practices. To achieve the above goals, this research employs multiple case study and multi-method approaches that combine qualitative methods (interviews and open-ended survey response analysis) and quantitative methods (network analysis). Interviews with guild leaders will result in within- and cross-case reports that provide a rich description of the pedagogical innovation championed by each guild and an assessment of the extent to which each guild is following a dissemination or propagation paradigm. Guild leader responses will be characterized using the Designing for Sustained Adoption Assessment Instrument, which assesses innovations for the effectiveness of their propagation intentions. Surveys of the guilds' primary and further-removed participants will result in an understanding of how widely adopted the innovation is and the construction of the resource networks used by faculty to implement new pedagogical innovations. By combining two established concepts (the dissemination/propagation paradigms and network analysis) in a unique way, the understanding of how organizational intent can influence adoption of innovative engineering education pedagogies/concepts will be advanced. This understanding is useful not only in engineering education, where researchers are continuously developing and studying new best practices in training the next generation of engineers, but also in other fields where educational innovations and research are seeking to broaden participation and improve the development of learners. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.