The Engineering Research Centers (ERCs), funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), play an important role in improving engineering education, bridging engineering academia and broad communities, and promoting a culture of diversity and inclusion. Each ERC must partner with an independent evaluation team to annually assess their performance and impact on progressing education, connecting community, and building diversified culture. This evaluation is currently performed independently (and in isolation), which leads to inconsistent evaluations and a redundant investment of ERCs’ resources into such tasks (e.g. developing evaluation instruments). These isolated efforts by ERCs to quantitatively evaluate their education programs also typically lack adequate sample size within a single center, which limits the validity and reliability of the quantitative analyses.
Three ERCs, all associated with a large southwest university in the United States, worked collaboratively to overcome sample size and measure inconsistency concerns by developing a common quantitative instrument that is capable of evaluating any ERC’s education and diversity impacts. The instrument is the result of a systematic process with comparing and contrasting each ERC’s existing evaluation tools, including surveys and interview protocols. This new, streamlined tool captures participants’ overall experience as part of the ERC by measuring various constructs including skillset development, perception of diversity and inclusion, future plans after participating in the ERC, and mentorship received from the ERC. Scales and embedded items were designed broadly for possible use with both yearlong (e.g. graduate and undergraduate student, and postdoctoral scholars) and summer program (Research Experience for Undergraduates, Research Experience for Teachers, and Young Scholar Program) participants. The instrument was distributed and tested during Summer 2019 with participants in the summer programs from all three ERCs. The forthcoming paper will present the new common cross-ERC evaluation instrument, demonstrate the effort of collecting data across all three ERCs, present preliminary findings, and discuss collaborative processes and challenges. The preliminary implication for this work is the ability to directly compare educational programs across ERCs. The authors also believe that this tool can provide a fast start for new ERCs on how to evaluate their educational programs.
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Particle Engineering Research from the NSF ERC Research Experience for Teachers (RET) Program at NJIT
We aim to give highlights of particle engineering research from the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT)’s Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) Program, which is a collaboration of the NSF Engineering Research Center for Structured Organic Particulate Systems (ERC-SOPS) and the Center for Pre-College Programs. This NSF-funded program engaged pairs of 14 high school teachers in 2015 summer research program, where they performed research on various particulate materials and processes relevant to pharmaceutical products. In addition, various faculty and educational experts delivered workshops on technical writing, best research practice, effective collaboration in a team, pharmaceutical industry and process–formulation development, educational module development, etc. The teachers acquired the skills and knowledge of research and the subject of particle engineering and pharmaceutical engineering that they incorporated into their teaching practice. In the research component of the program, the teachers collaborated with graduate student mentors under the guidance of professors and worked on various particle–pharmaceutical engineering projects. In the educational component, the teachers came up with a professional development plan and prepared “educational modules”, which were delivered to high school students. While this presentation will expose few educational highlights including sample modules developed by the teachers, it will mainly focus on two summer research projects about the bioavailability enhancement of poorly water-soluble drugs via drug nanoparticle composites and drug nanoparticle-laden polymer strip films. Through application of particle engineering approaches such as nanoparticle formation–stabilization and drug encapsulation within hydrophilic polymeric matrices, we have ensured fast redispersibility of drug nanoparticles from solid dosages and demonstrated significant improvement of the dissolution rate of poorly water-soluble drugs.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1301071
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10022426
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- AICHE Annual Meeting
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Funded by the NSF Division of Computer and Network Systems, this grant establishes a new Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) Site at the University of South Alabama (USA). In the summer of 2021, eight middle school and high school teachers from two local public-school districts spent six weeks engaged with research activities on biologically-inspired computing systems. They worked on discovery-based research projects and obtained transdisciplinary research experience on biologically-inspired computing systems spanning application (cancer detection), algorithm (Spiking Neural Networks), architecture and circuit (synaptic memory design), and device (memristor). The USA faculty mentors, curriculum development specialist from school districts, Instructional Coach from Science/Mathematics faculty at USA coached participants as they designed standards-compliant curriculum modules and conducted professional development activities. The implementation details of the summer program and the evaluation results are presented in this paper.more » « less
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National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Engineering Research Centers (ERC) must complement their technical research with various education and outreach opportunities to: 1) improve and promote engineering education, both within the center and to the local community; 2) encourage and include the underrepresented populations to participate in Engineering activities; and 3) advocate communication and collaboration between industry and academia. ERCs ought to perform an adequate evaluation of their educational and outreach programs to ensure that beneficial goals are met. Each ERC has complete autonomy in conducting and reporting such evaluation. Evaluation tools used by individual ERCs are quite similar, but each ERC has designed their evaluation processes in isolation, including evaluation tools such as survey instruments, interview protocols, focus group protocols, and/or observation protocols. These isolated efforts resulted in redundant resources spent and lacking outcome comparability across ERCs. Leaders from three different ERCs led and initiated a collaborative effort to address the above issue by building a suite of common evaluation instruments that all current and future ERCs can use. This leading group consists of education directors and external evaluators from all three partners ERCs and engineering education researchers, who have worked together for two years. The project intends to address the four ERC program clusters: Broadening Participation in Engineering, Centers and Networks, Engineering Education, and Engineering Workforce Development. The instruments developed will pay attention to culture of inclusion, outreach activities, mentoring experience, and sustained interest in engineering. The project will deliver best practices in education program evaluation, which will not only support existing ERCs, but will also serve as immediate tools for brand new ERCs and similar large-scale research centers. Expanding the research beyond TEEC and sharing the developed instruments with NSF as well as other ERCs will also promote and encourage continual cross-ERC collaboration and research. Further, the joint evaluation will increase the evaluation consistency across all ERC education programs. Embedded instrumental feedback loops will lead to continual improvement to ERC education performance and support the growth of an inclusive and innovative engineering workforce. Four major deliveries are planned. First, develop a common quantitative assessment instrument, named Multi-ERC Instrument Inventory (MERCII). Second, develop a set of qualitative instruments to complement MERCII. Third, create a web-based evaluation platform for MERCII. Fourth, update the NSF ERC education program evaluation best practice manual. These deliveries together will become part of and supplemented by an ERC evaluator toolbox. This project strives to significantly impact how ERCs evaluate their educational and outreach programs. Single ERC based studies lack the sample size to truly test the validity of any evaluation instruments or measures. A common suite of instruments across ERCs would provide an opportunity for a large scale assessment study. The online platform will further provide an easy-to-use tool for all ERCs to facilitate evaluation, share data, and reporting impacts.more » « less
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