IGE: Learning the Entire Pipeline: Analyzing and Improving Graduate Engineering Education through Communities of Practice

这项授予北卡罗来纳州立大学的国家科学基金会研究生教育创新奖(IGE)将支持关键工程领域的研究生如何在不同的跨学科团队中学习将学术知识付诸实践的开创性研究。为了使学生做好将课堂经验转化为专业实践的准备，工程教育需要提高学生在多学科团队中工作的能力，处理不同的观点、想法和背景，并扩大他们的教育范围，以了解工程解决方案在全球背景下的影响。该项目采用了一个被称为“实践社区”(COP)的高度发展的理论框架，并在土木工程、计算机科学和电气工程的研究生课程中应用、研究并进一步扩展了COP理论。这种方法非常强调协作、团队合作、知识即行动以及跨学科和文化背景的沟通。通过将这种方法应用于北卡罗来纳州立大学三个不同工程系的三门工程课程，该项目将深入了解学生在不同团队环境中的互动和学习：1)融入专业工程环境，研究学生如何与专业人士互动，以及学术和专业团体如何从他们的接触中学习；2)在将两个学科团体聚集在一起的团队中参与跨学科项目；以及3)与需要整合为一个工作整体的子系统的团队一起参与跨学科项目。该项目将侧重于多样性如何在COPS中发挥作用，检查哪些因素导致所有人的生产性参与，哪些挑战阻碍参与，并调查构建学术COPS以支持所有人公平学习和贡献的方法。通过这一涉及三门不同课程的不同设置和粒度的方法，本项目将发展更广泛的视野，了解工科学生如何在不同的团队环境中学习。建议的方法可以帮助弥合理论和实践之间的差距，促进能够在团队、项目和领域内和跨团队、项目和领域工作的员工队伍的发展。为了帮助将拟议的方法应用于其他学科，我们将在未来的出版物和演示文稿中制定和传播一套指导方针。研究生教育创新(IGE)项目专注于研究生教育的研究。IGE的目标是试验、测试和验证研究生教育的创新方法，并产生将这些方法推广到更广泛社区所需的知识。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。

This National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) award to North Carolina State University will support groundbreaking research on how graduate students in critical Engineering domains learn to put academic knowledge into practice while working in diverse, interdisciplinary teams. In order to prepare students to transfer their classroom experiences to professional practice, engineering education needs to improve students’ ability to work in multidisciplinary teams, deal with diverse opinions, ideas, and backgrounds, and broaden their education to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global context. This project adopts a highly developed theoretical framework called “communities of practice” (CoP) and applies, researches, and further extends CoP theory in graduate classes across Civil Engineering, Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering. This approach has a strong emphasis on collaboration, teamwork, knowledge as doing, and communication across disciplinary and cultural backgrounds. By applying this approach in three engineering courses from three different engineering departments at North Carolina State University, this project will yield insights around student interactions and learning within different team settings: 1) integration into a professional engineering environment, studying how students interact with professionals and how the academic and professional communities learn from their encounters; 2) engagement in interdisciplinary projects in teams that bring together two disciplinary communities; and 3) engagement in interdisciplinary projects with teams that work on subsystems which need to be integrated into one working whole. This project will focus on how diversity plays out in CoPs, examine what factors lead to productive participation by all, what challenges inhibit participation and investigate approaches to structuring academic CoPs to support equitable learning and contributions by all. Through this approach which involves various settings and granularities in three different courses, this project will develop a broader view of how engineering students learn in different team settings. The proposed approach can help to bridge the gap between theory and practice, facilitating the development of a workforce that can work within and across teams, projects, and domains. To help apply the proposed approaches to other disciplines, we will develop and disseminate a set of guidelines in our future publications and presentations. The Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program is focused on research in graduate education. The goals of IGE are to pilot, test, and validate innovative approaches to graduate education and to generate the knowledge required to move these approaches into the broader community.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.