Collaborative Research: Design for Impact - Creating Effective Student Activities that Faculty Will Use

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Developing students' understanding of fundamental concepts is a primary goal of undergraduate engineering education. Innovations such as concept questions, model-eliciting activities, and inquiry-based instruction have consistently been found to be more effective for promoting conceptual change. However, these innovative approaches were designed with educational effectiveness as the foremost (or only) concern. Considerably less research has been devoted to understanding how to design these activities to increase their adoption by engineering faculty. The primary challenge facing engineering reform today is not primarily to develop more effective instructional strategies but to find ways to get faculty to adopt instructional techniques that we already know to be more effective than the traditional methods still found in the majority of undergraduate engineering classrooms. This project addresses that challenge by identifying methods of developing instructional modules that are simultaneously effective for student learning gains and faculty adoptability. This project is developing instructional materials for heat transfer, an important foundational course for chemical, mechanical and other engineering majors. It is combining the research on student learning of fundamental concepts with research on adoption and change to develop materials that professors are more likely to actually use in their classes. The materials are being evaluated for "usability" by a panel of professors at different types of institutions who work with a diverse range of engineering student populations. Ongoing evaluation of the project is monitoring the most frequently downloaded activities and relating this information to factors that promote faculty adoption. The literature on diffusion of innovation into the college classroom identifies several factors that inhibit adoption of new approaches. These include faculty concerns about (1) preparation time, (2) class time, (3) effectiveness, (4) student resistance, (5) inflexible teaching environments and (6) inability to adapt innovations to suit their needs. There is therefore a need to develop approaches that minimize these identified barriers so that effective practices are more widely adopted and consequently provide broad impact. The findings of this project will inform future efforts to promote faculty adoption of new instructional practices in other STEM areas.