This research project would hold an NSF-Engineering Education grantees meeting for invited PIs from engineering Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU), Research Experiences for Teachers (RET), Department-Level Reform (DLR), Engineering Education Programs (EEP), Faculty Early Career (CAREER); pre-college outreach coordinators from Engineering Research Centers (ERC). In addition selected students from REU sites, selected teachers from RET sites, and guest presenters would be invited. Meeting activities will include a keynote speaker, poster sessions, networking opportunities and hour-long workshops for awardees. With an engineering education department and facilities in the northern Virginia Region, Virginia Tech is uniquely positioned to host this meeting. The university?s Continuing and Professional Education office provides professional meeting coordination services under the supervision of junior faculty, whose networks and professional reputations will be expanded by hosting this meeting. This meeting will serve as the impetus for forming a professional group of engineering academic deans, who will receive invitations from the NSF as the principal audience for the research to be discussed at this meeting. Like other administrators, engineering academic deans should have a formal group that meets annually to share strategies and learn about cutting-edge research in engineering education.
Bringing together leading researchers and practitioners in engineering education is a key activity to advancing engineering education as a research discipline. Representation of diverse projects and initiatives in engineering education ensures that exciting new connections and ideas will be sparked by this meeting. This meeting provides the opportunity for investigators, RET teachers, REU students, distinguished guest speakers, graduate students and NSF program officers to interact across NSF Engineering Education and Centers programs. The networks that will form across these programs will enhance the infrastructure for research and education improvement in engineering. The meeting will advance discovery and understanding while promoting teaching, training, and learning through its dual focus on research and education projects. Society will ultimately benefit from this meeting through NSF?s ongoing engineering education projects, which will be enriched by the information and connections made at this meeting.
? Engineering education research seeks to transform engineering curricula nationally to keep pace with the changing demands of the global marketplace and insure that U.S. engineers continue to innovate and create jobs and products that make the nation the global technology leader. The outcomes of these projects include best practices, assessment and evaluation of existing teaching approaches, and findings about student learning and development that can inform teaching. To insure that the results of NSF-funded studies in this area have wide-reaching impact, it is critical to provide venues for engineering education researchers to share their knowledge and experiences. Transformation only happens when the results of engineering education research are put into practice in the classroom. The NSF Engineering Education Awardees Conference supported by this grant has provided such a venue. It has allowed researchers and practitioners to come together to not only share the results of their research, but also to share strategies for disseminating their work to wider audiences, to establish partnerships that will support implementation of research findings at other institutions, to generate new ideas and collaborations, and to engage in discussions with program officers at the National Science Foundation about critical next steps for supporting the educational development of the next generation of technology leaders. In 2009 and 2010, the conference successfully brought together researchers, engineering faculty, high school teachers, and students in Reston, Virginia to achieve these goals. The conference included researchers and teachers from both K-12 and higher education, and a majority of those who attended reported that they learned new practices they could implement in the classroom. In addition, the conference was instrumental in creating the Graduate Engineering Education Research Consortium for Students (GEECS). GEECS is a network of graduate students passionate about engineering education and poised to insure that the transformative efforts currently underway are embraced and extended by the next generation of educators. Through a variety of workshops, poster sessions, and networking activities, the conference provided a critical mechanism to share approaches to research, develop networks of collaborators to support both broader implementation of results and future research project, and interact with program officers at NSF to productively inform future directions.
