Synthesis Research: Evaluating Instructional Scholarship in Engineering

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This synthesis project is being conducted by the National Academy of Sciences, and its main objectives are to identify new options -- with respect to choices of metrics, processes for evaluation of metrics, and agents to perform the evaluation of metrics -- for evaluating scholarly teaching, and to validate the options identified by the engineering education community and other relevant stakeholders. The specific tasks include: convening an organizational meeting of the study committee; commissioning background papers by knowledgeable experts; convening a meeting of the study committee to review the background papers and finalize plans for a stakeholders-meeting white papers; hosting of a stakeholders meeting; and synthesizing these inputs in to final report to be distributed to all engineering deans and chairs in the US. This is envisioned to be the first phase of a two-part effort; the second phase would move towards broad implementation of these metrics in various institutions. An ultimate goal of this program of work is not only to improve teaching in engineering, but also to improve the status of teaching excellence relative to research productivity in the engineering community. The intellectual merit of this project lies in the synthesis of research on evaluation of teaching, its particularization to the engineering discipline; and the identification of choices for metrics of the scholarship of teaching, schemes for evaluation of selected metrics, and agents to evaluate the selected metrics that are acceptable to engineering faculty, departments, and disciplinary groups. If valid and reliable means to assess instructional scholarship are identified, and they are accepted by the engineering community, then greater attention would be devoted to scholarly teaching by engineering faculty and departments. The broader impact of such attention would be improved student learning and, eventually, enhanced performance by working engineers.