A Model for Human-Centered Engineering Education: Broadening Engineering Teaching with Theory-based Educational Resources (BETTER)

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This project aims to serve the national interest by providing professional development for faculty in order to significantly enhance engineering education by placing greater emphasis on the affective domain of teaching. Overall, engineering faculty adoption of learner-centered pedagogical practices tends to be slow and short-term. It is thought that this is because even when evidence-based pedagogical practices are implemented, faculty still approach their teaching based on their own beliefs and conceptions about teaching and teacher-student interactions. As in many educational systems, there is an emphasis on control, conformity, and objectivity rather than freedom, creativity, engagement, and empowerment. This non- human-centered approach compromises the preparation of students for the challenges of professional engineering practice. The proposed faculty development project seeks to address this challenge by calling for a significantly more human-centered way of teaching. Such a humanistic-educative caring framework, grounded in “Caring Science” from the discipline of nursing, is proposed for engineering education. The process involves dialogue, reflection, and co-creation of knowledge by both the teacher and the learner. Expected benefits include enhanced student learning and better faculty appreciation of the lived experiences of students.The novel framework proposed embraces openness to the teaching-learning process through the use of Communities of Practice (CoP) which support professional development of faculty to promote greater emphasis on the affective domain of teaching. The intellectual merit of the project centers around researcher plan to examine the impact of a faculty development curriculum, grounded in a humanistic-educative framework, on promoting a human-centered model to engineering education. Two research questions are posited to guide the investigations on the impact of the intervention on faculty instructional style. The first question seeks to understand the impact of this caring framework on the faculty participants. The second question seeks to understand differences between courses offered by faculty who experience the framework via a Community of Practice or a Self-Paced Learning Group. These research questions are to be answered using a multi-site quasi-experimental, explanatory sequential mixed-methods design. The broader impacts of the project include the advancement of the current state of engineering pedagogy through equipping of faculty members with a conceptual understanding of important learning theories and knowledge of evidence-based pedagogical practices. There is independent external evaluation of the process of conducting the activities by a qualified external evaluator. Findings from this project – disseminated via national conferences and peer-reviewed journals - could potentially revolutionize faculty training and result in increased use of evidence-based teaching practices across a broad scale of institutions and disciplines. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through its Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.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.