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

我们对工程专业学生如何学习的理解与当前工程教育实践之间的差距继续扩大。人物角色是来自以用户为中心的设计领域的工具，它有望帮助工程教育工作者利用不断增长的研究成果来改进教育体验的设计。基于有希望的初步工作，华盛顿大学的这个项目使用人物角色作为两种干预措施的基础：教育工作者研讨会和教育工作者设计会议。这个项目的重点是教育工作者如何在每一个干预措施中利用人物角色。这种对新的教师发展方法的严格研究有助于将重要的研究成果转移到那些可以充分利用它们的人的头脑和手中-工程教师，员工和学生。PI采用设计实验方法，其特点是多次迭代、持续分析和活动文档。该团队包括一位经验丰富的教师开发人员，一位国际公认的工程学生体验研究员，以及一位研究工程学生体验和工程教育工作者思维过程的研究员。这项研究有可能通过加快对工程学生学习的研究影响教学和学习实践的速度而产生变革。通过帮助工程系教师、政策制定者和学术支持人员更好地利用教育研究，包括对代表性不足的学生的经验进行重要研究，该项目正在更广泛地改善这些经验和工程教育的质量。本研究的结果将是一个自适应的人物角色模型，在传达工程教育研究成果，工程教师有用。

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.