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1. How One Implementation of an Educational Innovation Died

   Ramey, K; Stevens, R (January 2020, Proceedings of the 14th International Conference of the Learning Sciences: The Interdisciplinarity of the Learning Sciences)

   Gresalfi, M; Horn, I (Ed.)

   The problem of sustaining and spreading educational innovations is one that has vexed many researchers. The flipside of this question, equally important, is what leads to the ‘death’ of educational innovations? Here, to shed light on this question, we provide an autopsy on the death of one local implementation of an otherwise successful STEAM exploration program called FUSE. 

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2. Orchestrating a culture-aligned adoption and adaptation of an instructional innovation: A story of an engineering professor’s pedagogical decisions between innovation and school culture

   Lee, Y.; Evenhouse, D.; DeBoer, J.; Rhoads, J.; Berger, E. (June 2022, ASEE 2022)

   Engineering education researchers and practitioners have driven instructional innovation in undergraduate engineering instruction. Much of the research about educational innovation has focused on undergraduate classrooms in large enrollment courses and/or research-intensive institutions. Propagation of innovations across settings, especially those quite unlike the original context, has received less attention in the literature. This includes liberal arts institutions, which collectively educate a large number of undergraduate engineering students in various contexts. Therefore, this study focuses on the implementation of an instructional innovation in a liberal arts institution that started a new engineering program to educate a regional engineering workforce. This qualitative study documented the experiences of one engineering instructor who adopted and adapted a blended learning environment for undergraduate dynamics designed to promote active and collaborative learning in undergraduate engineering courses. We analyzed interviews, documents, artifacts, visual materials, and field notes to examine the propagation of the instructional system in context with cultural features in local institution settings. Our findings show how an engineering instructor orchestrated a culture-aligned adoption and adaptation of an instructional innovation. Using reflective practice, the research participant adapted the implemented innovative instruction to their hands-on institution culture, such as adjusting expectations in content, adapting resources to students’ individual needs, adjusting uncertainty of problem solving, and adapting to a hands-on institution culture. This research highlights the important role of institutional culture in local adaptations of educational innovations, and it provides the community with an expanded way to think about innovation propagation. 

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3. How Engineering Education Guilds are Expanding our Understanding of Propagation in Engineering Education

   Mallouk, Kaitlin E.; Strong, Alexandra C.; Riley, Darby R.; Faber, Courtney J. (September 2022, Journal of STEM education)

   Background: The National Science Foundation (NSF) and other organizations have spent millions of dollars each year supporting well-designed educational innovations that positively impact the undergraduate engineering students who encounter them. However, many of these pedagogical innovations never experience widespread adoption. To further the ability of innovation developers to advance engineering education practice and achieve sustained adoption of their innovations, this paper explores how one community-based model, engineering education guilds, fosters propagation across institutions and individuals. Engineering education guilds seek to work at the forefront of educational innovation by creating networks of instructor change-agents who design and implement a particular innovation in their own context. The guilds of interest are the Consortium to Promote Reflection in Engineering Education (CPREE) and the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN). With these guilds as exemplars, this study’s purpose is (1) to articulate how the approaches of engineering education guilds align with existing literature on supporting sustained adoption of educational innovations and (2) to identify how these approaches can advance the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education community’s discussion of propagation practices through the use of the Designing for Sustained Adoption Assessment Instrument (DSAAI). The DSAAI is a conceptual framework based on research in sustained adoption of pedagogical innovations. It has previously been used in the form of a rubric to analyze dissemination and propagation plans of NSF educational grant recipients and was shown to predict the effectiveness of those propagation plans. Results: Through semi-structured interviews with two leaders from each guild, we observed strong alignment between the structures of CRPEE and KEEN and evidence-based sustained adoption characteristics. For example, both guilds identified their intended audience early in their formation, developed and implemented extensive plans for engaging and supporting potential adopters, and accounted for the complexity of the higher education landscape and their innovations in their propagation plans. Conclusions: Our results suggest that guilds could provide another approach to innovation, as their structures can be aligned with evidence-based methods for propagating pedagogical innovations. Additionally, while the DSAAI captures many of the characteristics of a welld-esigned propagation strategy, there are additional components that emerged as successful strategies used by the CPREE and KEEN guild leaders. These strategies, including having mutual accountability among adopters and connecting adoption of innovations to faculty reward structures in the form of recognition and funding should be considered as educational innovators work to encourage adoption of their innovations. 

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4. Combining Student and Teacher Feedback for Effective Science Writing

   Goss, William; Singh, Purushratha; Puntambekar, Sadhana; Gnesdilow, Dana; Kim, ChanMin; Passonneau, Rebecca J. (July 2022, International Society for the Learning Sciences Conference)

   This is a contribution to a Symposium This symposium will provide opportunities for discussion about how Artificial Intelligence can support ambitious learning practices in CSCL. To the extent that CSCL can be a lever for educational equitable educational change, AI needs to be able to support the kinds of practices that afford agency to students and teachers. However, AI also brings to the fore the need to consider equity and ethics. This interactive session will provide opportunities to discuss these issues in the context of the examples presented here. Our contribution is focused on two participatory design studies we conducted with 14 teachers to understand the kinds of automatic feedback they thought would support their students’ science explanation writing as well as how they would like summaries of information from students’ writing presented in a teacher’s dashboard. We also discuss how we developed our system, PyrEval, for automated writing support based on historical data and scoring from manual coding rubrics. 

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5. Empowering Secondary School Teachers: Creating, Executing, and Evaluating a Transformative Professional Development Course on ChatGPT

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE61694.2024.10893106  

   Reichert, Heidi; Tabarsi, Benyamin T; Zang, Zifan; Fennell, Cheri; Bhandari, Indira; Robinson, David; Drayton, Madeline; Crofton, Catherine; Lococo, Matthew; Xu, Dongkuan; et al (October 2024, IEEE)

   Background and Context. This innovative practice full paper describes the development and implementation of a professional development (PD) opportunity for secondary teachers to learn about ChatGPT. Incorporating generative AI techniques from Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT into educational environments offers unprecedented opportunities and challenges. Prior research has highlighted their potential to personalize feedback, assist in lesson planning, generate educational content, and reduce teachers' workload, alongside concerns such as academic integrity and student privacy. However, the rapid adoption of LLMs since ChatGPT's public release in late 2022 has left educators, particularly at the secondary level, with a lack of clear guidance on how LLMs work and can be effectively adopted. Objective. This study aims to introduce a comprehensive, free, and vetted ChatGPT course tailored for secondary teachers, with the objective of enhancing their technological competencies in LLMs and fostering innovative teaching practices. Method. We developed a five-session interactive course on ChatGPT capabilities, limitations, prompt-engineering techniques, ethical considerations, and strategies for incorporating ChatGPT into teaching. We introduced the course to six middle and high school teachers. Our curriculum emphasized active learning through peer discussions, hands-on activities, and project-based learning. We conducted pre- and post-course focus groups to determine the effectiveness of the course and the extent to which teachers' attitudes toward the use of LLMs in schools had changed. To identify trends in knowledge and attitudes, we asked teachers to complete feedback forms at the end of each of the five sessions. We performed a thematic analysis to classify teacher quotes from focus groups' transcripts as positive, negative, and neutral and calculated the ratio of positive to negative comments in the pre- and post-focus groups. We also analyzed their feedback on each individual session. Finally, we interviewed all participants five months after course completion to understand the longer-term impacts of the course. Findings. Our participants unanimously shared that all five of the sessions provided a deeper understanding of ChatGPT, featured enough opportunities for hands-on practice, and achieved their learning objectives. Our thematic analysis underlined that teachers gained a more positive and nuanced understanding of ChatGPT after the course. This change is evidenced quantitatively by the fact that quotes with positive connotations rose from 45% to 68% of the total number of positive and negative quotes. Participants shared that in the longer term, the course improved their professional development, understanding of ChatGPT, and teaching practices. Implications. This research underscores the effectiveness of active learning in professional development settings, particularly for technological innovations in computing like LLMs. Our findings suggest that introducing teachers to LLM tools through active learning can improve their work processes and give them a thorough and accurate understanding of how these tools work. By detailing our process and providing a model for similar initiatives, our work contributes to the broader discourse on teaching professional educators about computing and integrating emerging technologies in educational and professional development settings. 

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