Engineering education guilds, such as the Consortium to Promote Reflection in Engineering Education (CPREE) and the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN), 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 to further the professional formation of engineers (PFE). While many of the innovations facilitated by CPREE and KEEN have been published extensively, it is unclear how successful the propagation of reflection and entrepreneurial mindset has been in the engineering education community. The major aim of this project is to characterize these two engineering education guilds with respect to their dissemination/propagation plans and, in the future, quantify the propagation of the innovations championed by CPREE and KEEN.
The research questions we seek to answer in this paper are: (1) What are the planned dissemination/propagation approaches of well-established engineering education guilds? and (2) To what extent do their characteristics align with the Designing for Sustained Adoption Assessment Instrument (DSAAI)? The DSAAI was developed in 2016 to provide education developers, grant writing consultants, and funding agencies with a tool for assessing the propagation plans of researchers developing educational change strategies.
To answer these questions, we conducted semi-structured interviews with the leaders of CPREE and KEEN. The transcriptions of the interviews will be used to create within-case reports for each guild. The within-case reports will consist of a rich description of the pedagogical innovation as well as the history of the guild and its goals. Using the DSAAI, we will qualitatively code the techniques that each guild is using to facilitate widespread adoption as well as the extent to which they are following a dissemination or propagation paradigm. Lastly, thematic analysis will be used to capture emerging themes that arise from the interviews.
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This content will become publicly available on November 1, 2024
Adoption of Pedagogical Innovations: Social Networks of Engineering Education Guilds
This work investigates how innovations propagate through two professional networks (guilds): the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) and the Consortium to Promote Reflection in Engineering Education (CPREE). Previous research has demonstrated that the adoption of pedagogical innovations is supported by the socialization of the innovation among potential adopters. In this work, we use social network analysis to explore the impact of professional connections on innovation adoption. Our research questions are: (1) How does overall social structure differ between guilds? (2) How do measures of social network structures relate to innovation adoption? A survey was distributed to members of KEEN and CPREE to capture the interactions respondents had while adopting the guild’s innovation. Social networks were generated for each guild and each respondent. These networks were analyzed to identify relationships between social network measures and the frequency of use of the innovation. Responses to open-ended questions were analyzed using thematic coding. The guilds’ overall structures impacted the formation and structure of distinct clusters/cliques, but these differing structures did not appear to affect sustained adoption. Individuals’ ego networks demonstrated a weak negative correlation between the frequency of adoption and the individual’s ego network density. Our results imply that having a diverse network exposes instructors to more ideas or allows them to see one idea from many perspectives.
more » « less- Award ID(s):
- 1927268
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10472249
- Publisher / Repository:
- Education Sciences
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Education Sciences
- Volume:
- 13
- Issue:
- 11
- ISSN:
- 2227-7102
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1102
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- ["instructional change","educational change","social networks","pedagogical innovations","change agents"]
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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