Most ABET-accredited civil engineering undergraduate programs include at least one required transportation course. However, many of these courses are taught as a collection of topics, disconnected from one another and from the rest of the discipline of civil engineering. This poses significant challenges for faculty, students and practitioners in transportation engineering. The aims of the conference are to: 1) engage and train a diverse group of educators in the development and application of active learning for transportation engineering at the undergraduate level, 2) engage and train diverse group of educators in the development and application of conceptual understanding in transportation engineering at the undergraduate level, and 3) promote and facilitate the adoption of the learning activities and conceptual assessments by conference participants as well as other transportation engineering educators around the country.
The conference organizing committee and expert lecturers include faculty in transportation engineering and engineering education with expertise in active learning and in students' conceptual understanding and misconceptions. At this conference, faculty participants participate in collaborative design of active learning modules and conceptual assessment in the undergraduate transportation engineering space. The specific aim of the conference is to increase the prevalence of active learning and conceptual assessment in the introduction to transportation engineering course taught by conference participants. The organizing committee is disseminating the conference outcomes to the broader STEM field through publications and presentations through groups such as the American Society for Engineering Education.
The development and widespread implementation of best practices in transportation engineering classrooms is important in attracting and retaining the next generation of transportation engineers. Engineering education professionals have uncovered many best practices in the field; however, the process of effectively disseminating and ultimately achieving the widespread adoption of these best practices by others is not yet well understood. Sixty participants, comprising faculty members, Ph.D. students, and public sector employees, attended a Transportation Engineering Education Workshop (TEEW) convened in Seattle, WA to promote the collaborative development and adoption of active learning and conceptual exercises in the introduction to transportation engineering class (Figure 1). Participant assessments were conducted in the form of pre-, post-, and follow-up surveys. Results showed shifts in participant beliefs about the importance of active learning and conceptual exercises, an increased density and connectivity of curriculum development networks, and extensive reports of valuable experiences and influences from the workshop. The TEEW activities were designed around two themes 1) the provision of evidence by nationally recognized experts supporting the efficacy of active and conceptual learning, and 2) the opportunity to collaboratively apply the new knowledge acquired. The presentations were intentionally short to keep the energy levels of the participants high and to maintain our focus on participants actively engaging in the content. In total the workshop resulted in the collaborative development of 108 draft learning activities and ranking tasks, 60 of which have been digitized and refined. An example ranking task is included in Figure 2. These materials can be found at the National Transportation Curriculum Website (http://nationaltransportationcurriculumproject.wordpress.com/). The major findings of the participant pre-, post- and follow-up surveys include: Most participants indicated a belief in the importance of active and conceptual learning in the classroom in both the pre- and post-surveys. It is not surprising that the largely self-selected participants were pre-disposed to value active and conceptual learning, and it is encouraging that, quantitatively speaking the value increased. This suggests that participants’ enthusiasm for active and conceptual learning was strengthened, making them more likely to expend the energy to implement such activities in the classroom. Participant beliefs that all instructors should implement active and conceptual learning activities in the classroom first increased (from immediately before to immediately after the workshop), then decreased (from immediately after to 6-months post). This could reflect both the recognition that implementing these techniques in the real world is significantly more challenging than developing them in a supportive environment, and that this is something with which those who have not been trained may struggle. This also provides indirect evidence for the value of the curriculum development network. It suggests that participants have developed a more nuanced understanding of the requirements for implementing such activities effectively. The six belief questions combined constitute a scale of questions measuring the educational value of active learning and conceptual exercises. Testing of this scale confirmed a statistically significant difference in post- and follow-up survey results and a nearly statistically significant difference in pre- and post- and pre- and follow-up survey results, indicating that when taken in the aggregate the questions posed in the surveys did demonstrate shifts in beliefs. The inclusiveness and density of the curriculum development network increased by 24% and 280%, respectively. This suggests that participants substantially widened their networks of engineering education colleagues through the workshop (Figure 3). Conference participants reported that they learned more about the importance and development of active conceptual exercises and developed network ties to facilitate future development and implementation. Most also indicated they either had already changed or were in the process of changing their practice as a result of the conference. These open-ended responses suggest that the workshop had the desired outcome of effecting change in transportation engineering classrooms. These data and the associated analysis should help to inform current efforts to coordinate professional development workshops for engineering faculty and to encourage the implementation of active learning and conceptual exercises in the classroom. Although direct causal links are not established between the workshop and the desired result of faculty adopting educational innovation in their classrooms, strong preliminary evidence is presented to suggest that the professional development workshop model described in this research effort did contribute to positive improvements in faculty beliefs, curriculum development networks, and classroom practice.
