"A Long Way Coming"--Understanding Engineering Educators' Transformations to Student-Centered Teaching

在过去的几十年里，在美国国家科学基金会的大力支持下，工程教育界已经产生了大量关于工程教学的知识。虽然基于证据的教育创新旨在增加STEM毕业生的数量，以应对社会的重大挑战，但这一工作对教学实践的广泛影响仍然有限。本工程教育研究旨在从经验上对个人教学转变产生基本的理解，并积极传播研究结果，以促进个人和机构的变革。更具体地说，研究小组将进行定性研究，以了解工程学院成功地从传统的以教师为中心的方法转变为更积极的学习，以学生为中心的方法的过程。研究团队将引出典型工程教育工作者在其学术生涯的不同阶段的个人叙述，以及来自不同的美国机构，他们已经过渡到更加以学生为中心的教学方法。本研究的更广泛的意义和重要性在于，通过提供个人转变的新视角，作为广泛采用以学生为中心的教学法的缺失部分，将显著推进对教育变革的理论理解。为了对教师变革有一个基本的了解，研究团队明确地设计了这项研究，为研究人员和参与者提供了机会，通过固有的反思性访谈过程来改进他们自己的教育实践。除了传统的传播模式，如期刊文章，研究团队将以构建叙事的形式传播研究成果，这些叙事代表了数据的基本模式，用于促进更广泛的工程教育工作者群体的类似转变。结合起来，这些努力将为建立广泛的变革和实现以前的教育研究对未来几代工程专业学生的承诺迈出一步。

Over the past decades, the engineering education community, with significant support from the National Science Foundation, has produced a large body of knowledge around engineering teaching and learning. While evidence-based educational innovations were targeted at increasing the number of STEM graduates prepared to meet society's grand challenges, the widespread impact of this body of work on teaching practice remains limited. This engineering education research study seeks to empirically generate a fundamental understanding of individual teaching transitions, and to actively disseminate the findings with the aim of fostering individual and institutional change. More specifically, the research team will conduct a qualitative research study with a view to understanding the process by which engineering faculty successfully transition from a traditional teacher-centered approach to a more active learning, student-centered approach. The research team will elicit personal narratives of exemplar engineering educators at various stages of their academic career and from diverse US institutions whom have transitioned to more student-centered teaching approaches.The broader significance and importance of this study will be to significantly advance the theoretical understanding of educational change by providing the novel perspective of individual transformations as the missing piece in the widespread adoption of student-centered pedagogies. With the aim of generating a fundamental understanding of faculty change, the research team explicitly designed this study to afford both researchers and participants in this study with opportunities to improve their own educational practice through the inherently reflective interview process. In addition to traditional modes of dissemination, such as journal articles, the research team will disseminate the research outcomes in the form of constructed narratives that represent fundamental patterns across the data to be used to foster similar transitions for a broader group of engineering educators. In combination, these efforts will provide a step towards instituting widespread change and realizing the promise that prior educational research holds for future generations of engineering students.