Adoption and Adaptation of Educational Innovations in Multiple Settings and the Role of Institutional Culture

在NSF改善本科生STEM教育计划：教育和人力资源(IUSE：EHR)的支持下，该项目旨在通过传播循证教学实践，服务于高质量工程教育的国家利益。几十年来，教育工作者一直在追求创新，以改善本科工程教育。这些创新中的许多都有令人信服的证据表明，它们在单一的课堂或机构中是有效的。然而，在新的环境中采用这些创新并不总是成功的，有时创新需要做出重大改变才能使其适应当地环境。这一发展和实施层面的机构和社区变革(ICT)项目将探索采用教育创新并使其适应新环境的方式。它还将根据学生成绩来评估创新的成功程度。这项研究将帮助社区了解教育创新可以传播的条件，以及一些创新成功地扩展到其他环境而另一些创新失败的原因。当创新能够容易地适应新环境时，学生将受益，因为他们将有更多机会获得以最好的方式支持他们教育的教学和学习工具。这个项目将推广自由形式，这是一个以前由NSF资助开发的教学系统。自由形式包含资源丰富的学习环境中的主动、混合和协作组件。五个新的环境将实施自由形式，项目组将同时评估新环境的文化，以评估其在实施过程中确定的对创新的接受度。对创新的接受度很重要，因为许多改革传统工程系核心教育实践的尝试都失败了，因为它们要么集中在少数几个狂热分子身上，改造了一两门课程，要么专注于课程改革，而没有考虑到学术单位的根本文化。这些变化往往不会持续，因为它们没有与当地文化适当地结合起来。这个项目将关注两个耦合的问题，创新和传播。如果将这两个问题作为一个系统一起探索和理解，那么开发可推广到新环境的教学创新的能力将大大增强。将使用人类学的方法，通过文化的视角来审视相应的收养和适应过程。先前的工作产生了独特的数据集和研究方法，探索了支持学生的教学创新和资源，以及系和大学文化在采用教学法方面的作用。目前的研究将使用混合方法来形成详细的数据收集和分析，利用研究团队的专业知识。这个项目有可能扩大对教学创新如何在不同环境中为不同的学生采用、调整和实施的理解。预计这一研究框架将适用于将其他教育创新推广到新的环境，并将为工程教育研究和实践者社区提供一种实施和评估教学变革的新方法。国际教育、科学及文化组织：EHR支持研究和开发项目，以提高所有学生STEM教育的有效性。通过机构和社区转型轨道，该计划支持高等教育机构和学科社区转变和改进STEM教育的努力。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

With support from the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program: Education and Human Resources (IUSE: EHR), this project aims to serve the national interest in high quality engineering education by propagating evidence-based teaching practices. Educators have pursued innovations to improve undergraduate engineering education for decades. Many of these innovations have compelling evidence of their effectiveness in a single classroom or institution. However, adoption of these innovations in new settings is not always successful, and sometimes the innovation requires substantial changes to adapt it to the local environment. This Institutional and Community Transformation (ICT) project in the Development and Implementation tier will explore the ways in which an educational innovation is adopted and adapted to new settings. It will also evaluate the success of the innovation, as measured by student outcomes. This research will help the community understand the conditions under which educational innovations can propagate and the reasons why some innovations succeed in being scaled to other settings while others fail. Students will benefit when innovations can be readily adapted to new environments because they will have increased access to teaching and learning tools that support their education in the best possible ways. This project will propagate Freeform, a pedagogical system developed with prior NSF funding. Freeform encompasses active, blended, and collaborative components in a resource-rich learning environment. Five new settings will implement Freeform, and the project team will simultaneously evaluate the cultures of the new settings to assess their receptivity to innovation as determined during the implementation. Receptivity to innovation is important because many attempts to reform the core educational practices in traditional engineering departments have failed because they have either been centered on a few enthusiasts who transformed one or two courses, or they have focused on curriculum reform without consideration of the underlying culture of the academic unit. The changes are often not sustained because they are not appropriately aligned with the local culture. This project will focus on two coupled issues, innovation and propagation. If these two issues are explored and understood together as a system, the ability to develop pedagogical innovations that can be propagated to new environments will be significantly enhanced. The corresponding process of adoption and adaptation will be examined through a cultural lens using anthropological approaches. Prior work has resulted in unique datasets and research approaches that explore pedagogical innovation and resources to support students and the role of departmental and university culture in the adoption of pedagogies. The current research will use a mixed-methods approach to shape detailed data collection and analysis, leveraging the research team's expertise. This project has the potential to expand understanding about how pedagogical innovations are adopted, adapted, and implemented for diverse students in multiple settings. It is expected that this research framework will be applicable to the propagation of other educational innovations to new settings, and it will provide the engineering education research and practitioner communities with a new approach to implementing and evaluating pedagogical changes. IUSE: EHR supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.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.