This engineering education research project seeks to continue ongoing work to better understand the barriers to wide adoption of educational methods that have been proven to improve many aspects of student learning in engineering. The PIs plan a comprehensive survey of electrical and chemical engineering faculty; the project partners with the IEEE (electrical engineering) and AIChE (chemical engineering) professional societies to improve participation. If successful, this research project will help provide the faculty perspective on barriers to broad adoption of research-proven pedagogies.
The broader significance and importance of this project will be to understand, then ultimately lower, barrier to adoption of teaching techniques that have been proven to engage diverse audiences of engineering students. While successful at improving retention and engagement of students, including those from under-represented groups, these techniques have not spread widely, and researchers do not yet have a clear understanding of why.
Innovative approaches to teaching undergraduate courses have been developed and shown to be effective, through many studies, in helping students master course content. In this study, these approaches to teaching have been referred to as research-based instructional strategies (RBISs). If RBISs were applied broadly across all of the engineering programs in the U.S, then, based on studies of their effectiveness, it is reasonable to predict that more students would successfully complete engineering programs and earn jobs to which engineering degrees provide access. Therefore, it is important to understand how widely RBISs are being used in engineering courses and understand barriers that hinder their broader use. Evidence about the extent to which engineering faculty members are using RBISs has not been extensively gathered and analyzed. To collect evidence regarding use of RBISs, the authors surveyed 387 faculty members in chemical, computer, electrical, and mechanical engineering about the extent to which they were aware of RBISs and the extent to which they were using them in core engineering courses. Survey data showed that awareness of RBISs was very high; but estimates of use of RBISs, based on survey data, varied from 10% to 70%, depending on characteristics of the strategy. So, awareness of RBISs is high, but their application is lower, often significantly lower. To promote broader use of RBISs, it was important to learn more about concerns that engineering faculty members had about using RBISs to teach their courses. The most frequently expressed concern was the amount of class time that using an RBIS might take. Engineering faculty members are well aware of how much material they need to cover in courses they teach and they were concerned that they would not be able to cover course content. Other frequently mentioned concerns included: how much preparation time faculty members would have to invest to apply RBISs, lack of evidence of their effectiveness, resistance from students about changes in how engineering courses were taught, and perceived lack of support from administration. A third set of questions has been raised about engineering faculty members who do adopt RBISs in their courses: How closely do faculty teaching approaches adhere to recommended implementation of RBIS? That is, how closely does engineering science classroom practice reflect the intentions of the original developers? While the question may be important, it can be difficult to collect and analyze how faculty members teach. High-quality measures of faculty instructional practice do not exist. Therefore, the authors had to create measures. The authors surveyed 387 U.S. faculty teaching chemical, computer, electrical, and mechanical engineering courses. To help estimate the degree to which faculty members followed recommended implementation of a RBIS, that is, the fidelity of implementation, the authors include questions about class time spent on sixteen (16) critical components of various RBISs together with questions about use of eleven (11) different RBIS. Fidelity was quantified as the percentage of RBIS users who also spent time on corresponding critical components. Overall fidelity of the 11 RBIS ranged from 11% to 80% of users spending time on all required components. Fidelity was highest for RBIS with one required component: case-based teaching, just-in-time teaching, and inquiry learning. Thirteen of 16 critical components discriminated between users and nonusers for all RBIS that were related to the 16 critical components.
