Collaborative Research: Design for Impact - Creating Effective Student Activities that Faculty Will Use

培养学生对基本概念的理解是本科工程教育的首要目标。人们一直发现，概念问题、模型引出活动和基于探究的教学等创新对于促进概念变化更为有效。然而，这些创新的方法都是以教育有效性为首要（或唯一）考虑的。相当少的研究致力于理解如何设计这些活动以增加工程学院对它们的采用。当今工程改革面临的主要挑战不是开发更有效的教学策略，而是找到方法让教师采用我们已经知道的比大多数本科工程课堂上仍然存在的传统方法更有效的教学技术。本项目通过确定开发教学模块的方法来解决这一挑战，这些模块同时对学生的学习收益和教师的可接受性有效。本课题为化学、机械等工程专业的一门重要的基础课程——传热学教材的编写。它将对学生学习基本概念的研究与对采用和改变的研究结合起来，开发出教授更有可能在课堂上实际使用的材料。这些材料的“可用性”正在由来自不同类型院校的教授组成的小组进行评估，这些教授与各种各样的工程专业学生打交道。正在进行的项目评估是监测最频繁下载的活动，并将这些信息与促进教师采用的因素联系起来。关于创新扩散到大学课堂的文献指出了抑制采用新方法的几个因素。这些包括教师对以下方面的担忧：(1)准备时间；(2)上课时间；(3)有效性；(4)学生阻力；(5)教学环境不灵活；(6)无法适应创新以满足他们的需求。因此，有必要制定办法，尽量减少这些已查明的障碍，以便更广泛地采用有效的做法，从而产生广泛的影响。该项目的研究结果将为未来促进教师在其他STEM领域采用新的教学实践提供参考。

Developing students' understanding of fundamental concepts is a primary goal of undergraduate engineering education. Innovations such as concept questions, model-eliciting activities, and inquiry-based instruction have consistently been found to be more effective for promoting conceptual change. However, these innovative approaches were designed with educational effectiveness as the foremost (or only) concern. Considerably less research has been devoted to understanding how to design these activities to increase their adoption by engineering faculty. The primary challenge facing engineering reform today is not primarily to develop more effective instructional strategies but to find ways to get faculty to adopt instructional techniques that we already know to be more effective than the traditional methods still found in the majority of undergraduate engineering classrooms. This project addresses that challenge by identifying methods of developing instructional modules that are simultaneously effective for student learning gains and faculty adoptability. This project is developing instructional materials for heat transfer, an important foundational course for chemical, mechanical and other engineering majors. It is combining the research on student learning of fundamental concepts with research on adoption and change to develop materials that professors are more likely to actually use in their classes. The materials are being evaluated for "usability" by a panel of professors at different types of institutions who work with a diverse range of engineering student populations. Ongoing evaluation of the project is monitoring the most frequently downloaded activities and relating this information to factors that promote faculty adoption. The literature on diffusion of innovation into the college classroom identifies several factors that inhibit adoption of new approaches. These include faculty concerns about (1) preparation time, (2) class time, (3) effectiveness, (4) student resistance, (5) inflexible teaching environments and (6) inability to adapt innovations to suit their needs. There is therefore a need to develop approaches that minimize these identified barriers so that effective practices are more widely adopted and consequently provide broad impact. The findings of this project will inform future efforts to promote faculty adoption of new instructional practices in other STEM areas.