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Context: Effective reform of engineering education necessitates the widespread implementation and dissemination of pedagogical innovations globally. However, to ensure the successful propagation of these innovations, we need to better understand the adaptations that they undergo when adopted at a new institution, and the extent to which they differ from the original innovation. This includes understanding the student experience with the innovation. Purpose or Goal: This study examines the propagation and adaptation of Freeform, a learning environment for teaching an undergraduate dynamics course developed at a large Midwestern university in the United States. Specifically, our goal is to understand how students at an adopting institution used Freeform’s learning resources. Our research questions are: 1) What are the students’ archetypical patterns of resource usage at the adopting institution? 2) In what ways do those patterns differ from those of students at the original institution of Freeform? Methods We conducted a model-based clustering analysis to answer our two research questions. The analysis was conducted on survey data from 50 engineering students at the Freeform adopting institution. This data articulated how frequently students used nine different resources of the Freeform ecosystem. Outcomes: Our analysis identified 4 resource-usage patterns in the Freeform adopting institution in comparison to 9 patterns for students at the institution where Freeform originated. In the Freeform adopting institution, the most frequent resources that students utilized were Teaching Assistants (TAs) and other students who were not enrolled in the course. This contrasts with the original institution where students relied mostly on the course lecturebook and their classmates. Conclusion: This study highlights the importance of taking into consideration the differences across institutions when propagating pedagogical innovations such as Freeform. Our results suggest that instructors should anticipate those differences so that the adoption and onboarding process can be optimized for success.
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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
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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- Award ID(s):
- 1915574
- PAR ID:
- 10355877
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ASEE 2022
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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null (Ed.)Prior research indicates that empathy can help engineers achieve better outcomes in team-based, design, entrepreneurial, and humanitarian environments. We describe an educational innovation designed to teach engineering students empathic communication skills. Written in the spirit of a propagation (versus dissemination) paradigm, we focus on how the original innovation was adapted to fit into two instructional settings that differed from the first implementation context. We use first person instructor accounts to describe these adaptation processes, including interactions between the developers and the adopters of the innovation, what modifications were necessary to “fit” the innovation into the new settings, and adopter experiences. We conclude with a brief discussion of particularly salient propagation considerations that emerged for the two adopters including, for example, the amount of instructional time available for implementing the empathic communication exercises, and how to achieve student buy-in in different course settings. The two main contributions of this paper are, first, the rich descriptions of how features of the original educational innovation had to be modified to meet the two other settings’ pedagogical goals and, second, an example of how to advance scholarship that supports the propagation of engineering education teaching and learning innovations.more » « less
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There is a critical need for research-based active learning instructional materials for the teaching and learning of STEM in online courses. Every year, hundreds of thousands of undergraduate non-science majors enroll in general education astronomy courses to fulfill their institution’s liberal arts requirements. When designing instructional materials for this population of learners, a central focus must be to help learners become more scientifically and data literate. As such, we developed a new, three-part, curricular model that was used to inform the creation of active-learning instructional materials designed for use in online courses. The instructional materials were designed to help introductory astronomy students engage meaningfully with science while simultaneously improving their data literacy self-efficacy (especially as it pertained to making evidence-based conclusions when presented with a variety of data representations). We conducted a pilot study of these instructional materials at nine different colleges and universities to better understand whether students’ engagement with these materials lead to improved beliefs and self-efficacy. The results of our student survey analysis showed statistically significant changes on survey items that assessed students’ beliefs about science engagement, citizen science, and their data literacy skills. Additionally, we assessed whether faculty who implemented these materials were able to easily incorporate them into existing online astronomy courses. The instructor feedback emphasized that our curriculum development model did successfully inform the creation of easy-to-implement instructional materials, generating the potential for widespread dissemination and use at the undergraduate level.more » « less
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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.more » « less
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