What Impacts Uptake of Innovations in Engineering Education?

• In Event: Sustainability & Transformation in Engineering Education - II: The Narratives & Limits of Engineering Education Reform

Abstract

Each of the four overlapping areas of STEM has different approaches to educational reform. Of the four engineering is very self-reflective, with a history of high profile reports make recommendations for education in the profession (Akera, 2017). These reports have impacted upon myriad aspects of engineering education including accreditation and curricular decisions. More recently there has been significant growth in the number of faculty pursuing research in engineering education over the last fifteen years. This field adopts methods from the social and learning sciences as well as methods in engineering and education to understand how engineers learn. This work has led to creation of a diffuse body of knowledge which stands in contrast to the highly centralized recommendations of blue-ribbon panels. There is, however, general consensus that the insights from this research are not being widely adopted into classroom practices (Borrego et. al., 2010). In this study we draw from interviews at multiple institutions that broadly span a spectrum of size, status, and resource-base to explore institutions’ own conceptions of educational program innovation. The interviews were collected as part of a multi-site, multi-scale investigation of governance in engineering education. Using a symbolic interaction framework to explore the artifacts and symbols of educational change, preliminary results indicate universities that couple top-down and bottom-up values and understandings focused on a few high-profile initiatives have stronger self-conceptions of innovative practices and more uptake of research-informed practices than institutions where there is misalignment between values and symbols used by faculty and administrators.

Authors

• Alan Cheville, Bucknell University

• Atsushi Akera, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

• Jennifer Karlin, Minnesota State University, Mankato

• Thomas De Pree, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

• Sarah Appelhans, University at Albany

• Donna Riley Riley, Purdue University

• Soheil Fatehiboroujeni, Purdue University