This engineering education research project seeks to understand the barriers to inter-institutional diffusion of educational institutions by examining transfer a successful engineering course which contextualizes engineering in a historical and societal context from Olin College of Engineering to California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo. Challenges to transfer will be explored using models from existing educational, organizational, and social change literature. The two goals of this project are to develop a method for characterizing the challenges that engineering educators face in disseminating curricular advances, and measuring whether the advances to student learning seen at one institution transfer to the partner school.
The broader significance and importance of this project is to explore why years of repeated demonstrations of successful courses, pedagogies, and educational models have not spread broadly across the education system. The course to be transferred links engineering content to the social and historical contexts which define and frame engineering problems, a model which potentially can help recruiting and retaining women in engineering. Beyond addressing the barriers to transfer, the course content addresses the emerging vision of revising engineering education to better address complex global problems called for by recent national panels.
OVERVIEW In this project, a collaborative research team including engineering, history, and education faculty sought to better understand how to successfully transfer innovative STEM curricular approaches across different institutions. Specifically, we adapted an existing and highly successful interdisciplinary project-based from Olin, a small private college, to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, a large public university. Using the existing Stuff of History course at Olin as a basis, we (1) identified key features, design strategies, implementation challenges, and student learning outcomes associated with integrated project-based courses; (2) created a set of flexible curriculum design tools that instructors may use to develop new course ideas; (3) designed and implemented a new integrated course at Cal Poly, and revised two project-based courses at Olin; and (4) disseminated our research findings on student learning, as well as our curriculum design strategies and tools, through publications as well as local, national, and international faculty workshops. INTELLECTUAL MERIT The research team successfully designed and implemented an entirely new integrated project-based course on embedded systems and social movements. Based on the existing Stuff of History course at Olin College, the PIs designed a high-level framework to provide scaffolding for the design of the new Cal Poly integrated course. The high-level framework focused on several elements of course design, such as (1) identification of broad, competency-based learning goals for the integrated course block, (2) development of learning activities that support broad goals such as communication, contextual awareness, and self-directed learning, and (3) selection of assessment methods aligned with broad competency goals and supportive of cross-disciplinary collaboration. The new Cal Poly course was deployed in spring 2012. As part of this project, the team also significantly revised two existing project-based courses at Olin, including the project-based introductory materials science course and the integrated history-materials science Stuff of History course. In all each of the new and revised courses, students actively engage with questions of technological and broader societal significance, such as the environmental impacts and ethical implications of low-cost consumer products (Figure 1). To gauge the effectiveness of the new and revised project-based courses, the research team collected data on student motivations, self-directed learning strategies, learning climate, and moral development in several of the course settings. The PIs demonstrated that integrating humanities with technical topics through project-based courses effectively supports increased student motivation (Figure 2) and engagement in self-regulated learning strategies. Findings also indicate that women in integrated technical-contextual courses report higher intrinsic motivation, task value, self-efficacy, and critical thinking strategy use compared to women in non-integrated technical courses. Finally, undergraduate engineering students found the integrated courses more supportive, and better for moral development, compared to non-integrated courses. Throughout the design and implementation process, the team tracked the opportunities and challenges associated with innovative course transfer. As a result, the research team produced several high-level frameworks (Figures 3-4) to provide scaffolding to faculty interested in creating new courses that connect multiple disciplines and actively engage students in projects. These frameworks encourage individual faculty or groups of instructors to approach the course design process in a more holistic manner, with a focus on student experience, collaborative faculty-faculty and faculty-student interactions, broad competency development, and shared goals across diverse disciplines. Feedback from numerous faculty workshops over the past three years has provided for continual development of the frameworks. BROADER IMPACT This project resulted in a multifaceted array of broader impacts on undergraduate students, STEM educational researchers, and practicing STEM faculty and administrators. The following paragraphs outline the near-term impacts, as well as the anticipated longer-term effects of the project. Undergraduate Students. Approximately 150 undergraduate STEM students at Olin and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo directly benefited from this project through their enrollment in the new or revised integrated courses supported by this study. In addition, about 50 students on other campuses have benefited from engagement in new integrated courses that were inspired by the work supported in this grant. STEM educational research community. The research team documented and reported the benefits of disciplinary integration on student motivation and self-regulated learning strategy use through conference papers, journal articles, invited seminars, and a book chapter. The long-term impacts of the formal research reporting from this study are not yet known. In the near-term, however, findings from this project have prompted several new lines of research inquiry, including several recent grant proposals by the PIs, aimed at more deeply understanding student motivation in project-based courses. STEM faculty and administrators. The PIs deployed the research-to-practice frameworks from this study at numerous faculty development workshops, both within and outside of the U.S. Approximately 700 faculty from around the world have gained experience in applying the frameworks to analyze and better understand existing courses, and many faculty groups have used the frameworks to design new integrated courses, or even entirely new programs, at their own institutions.
