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

国家科学基金会和其他组织已经并将继续每年花费数百万美元支持教育创新项目，以扩大参与范围，改善学生学习，并对本科工程专业学生产生积极影响。然而，由于各种原因，这些教育创新中的许多从未在最初设计的教室之外实施。为了提高教育创新被广泛应用的可能性，这项研究调查了教育者开发、分享和实施新的教学方法的方式。这个项目特别关注通过“工程教育协会”共享的教育创新，“工程教育协会”是围绕特定创新(例如，在工程教育中使用反思)组织起来的大型教职员工团体。这项研究的目标是了解(1)两个久负盛名的行会所倡导的创新是如何设计成易于被教育工作者采用的，以及(2)当采用新的教学方法时，教育工作者使用了什么资源，包括行会在采用中所扮演的角色。如果这些目标得以实现，教育创新的设计者和使用者将在教育变革的发展和采用方面获得更好的信息和支持，最终导致基于研究的课堂实践的采用增加。为了实现上述目标，本研究采用了定性方法(访谈和开放式调查响应分析)和定量方法(网络分析)相结合的多案例研究和多方法方法。与工会领导人的访谈将产生内部和跨案例报告，这些报告丰富地描述了每个工会倡导的教学创新，并评估了每个工会遵循传播或传播范例的程度。行业领袖的反应将使用持续采用设计评估工具进行表征，该工具评估创新对其传播意图的有效性。对行业协会的主要参与者和更远的参与者进行调查，将有助于了解创新被广泛采用的程度，以及教员为实施新的教学创新而使用的资源网络的构建。通过以独特的方式将两个已确立的概念(传播/传播范例和网络分析)结合在一起，将促进对组织意图如何影响采用创新的工程教育方法/概念的理解。这种理解不仅在工程教育中有用，研究人员正在不断开发和研究培养下一代工程师的新的最佳实践，而且在其他领域，教育创新和研究正在寻求扩大参与和改善学习者的发展。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。

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.