Collaborative Research: Workshop proposal: Building Foundations for Engineering Faculty in Engineering Education Research

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Engineering faculty bring an important perspective to engineering education research, yet they are rarely formally trained in educational research methods. Training engineering faculty in engineering education research will support faculty adopting research-based practices in the classroom and inform advising, programming, and policies. This project will develop a series of virtual workshops to support engineering faculty in developing educational research skills and will facilitate their integration into the engineering education research community. The workshops will also create a collaborative community of engineering faculty and educational research mentors that will support the development of engineering faculty and the success of engineering education research projects funded by the NSF. Sustained engagement of engineering faculty in educational research will create synergies between engineering education research and engineering education practice. Outcomes of this project will include (1) publicly available, archived resources about research in engineering education, (2) a sustainable community that supports the success of engineering faculty conducting engineering education research. The archived resources will be hosted on a public website and available to any faculty interested in learning educational research methods to improve engineering education. The community will connect engineering faculty with engineering education research experts and facilitate future opportunities for collaboration. These outcomes will ultimately strengthen and diversify the engineering education research community and make educational research more accessible to engineering faculty, which will in turn support training the future engineering workforce via implementation of research-based practices in engineering classrooms. The virtual workshop series will provide training, structured support, and a virtual community of practice for NSF Research Initiation in Engineering Formation (RIEF) program awardees to promote their sustained engagement in engineering education research through the development of research-related social capital, which enhances the flow of information, develops desirable credentials, and reinforces research identity. The team will use social network analysis and surveys throughout the two-year project to study how interactions (1) among program awardees and (2) between awardees and members of the engineering education research community influence the development of research-related social capital. The workshops will support the success of funded RIEF projects, helping program mentees fully integrate into the engineering education research community during and beyond their grant cycle, providing program mentors access to engineering education research resources to support their mentoring, developing an external support structure for mentees to learn about common research practices, and cultivating a community of other research mentors. This project will build program participants’ professional networks in engineering education research by increasing availability and accessibility of past and present program mentees and mentors, engineering education research content experts, people in leadership positions in the field, potential future collaborators, and others positioned to support or promote the work. This work will accelerate participants’ development of both strong and weak ties and facilitate their purposeful use of those embedded resources to help program mentees accomplish their engineering education research goals during the two-year RIEF project cycle and beyond. The project will study the impact of participation in a community of practice in developing engineering faculty in engineering education research as well as identify how program mentors effectively build mentee social capital. The project will build the engineering education research mentorship community, support engineering faculty professional development, and promote wider implementations of research-based practices to support students.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.