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Despite a large body of work devoted to understanding why instructors struggle to implement reformed instructional practices, researchers only understand part of the variation in instructor learning and implementation of the practices. This narrative inquiry case study explored how a mechanical engineering department adopted and adapted Freeform (Ff), which is a pedagogical system, that includes instructional resources and instructional ethos. Findings show that the department adopted Ff with a vision to standardize its dynamics course. The three instructors of four sections of the course had some shared and unshared mental models of engineering teaching and learning that somewhat aligned with the vision. While one instructor adopted all five critical components of Ff in her teaching, the other two instructors did not leverage all the components. The instructors shared some resources for the course and discussed their teaching with others but not sufficient to come to a consensus on the final exam. Consequently, the department could standardize the course materials, homework, quizzes, and schedule, but not the final exam. Via eliciting different dimensions of organizational learning that occurred at the mechanical engineering department, the research suggests ways to improve adopting reformed instructional practices. Moreover, our study contributes to the body of literature by revealing the complexity of instructors’ decision-making to adopt and adapt Ff and the relationship and interaction among disciplines of organizational learning in the context of teaching the dynamics course. 

Pedagogical innovation efforts in engineering education and other STEM fields highlight some of the inherent challenges and opportunities in the process of strengthening undergraduate education. While interactive pedagogical approaches involving peer teamwork and a mix of in-person and online resources have strengthened the quality of teaching/learning, few studies provide a close-up examination of how faculty members navigate the implementation of new learning systems developed in other institutional settings. In this paper we examine factors contributing to the lack of sustained adoption of an engineering learning system called Freeform in a new academic context. We found that while students lauded the learning system’s potential for deep learning practices, the lead instructor encountered several challenges in its implementation which precluded him from adopting the system in the long term. While the lead instructor recognized the pedagogical value of Freeform in helping students engage deeply with engineering concepts, he found its implementation to differ too greatly from his traditional teaching trajectory in addition to increasing his preparation workload and having other logistical barriers. Ultimately, Freeform was not compatible with the specific institutional culture of the engineering department where the study took place. We offer some potential solutions to ameliorate issues of compatibility when attempting to diffuse and implement pedagogical systems in different institutional contexts. 

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. 

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. 

Abstract—This research-to-practice full paper investigates the alignment of a specific pedagogical innovation, the Freeform pedagogical system, with the student culture(s) of the mechanical engineering department of a small private college (SPC) in the upper Midwest of the United States, we ask the research question: What are the defining characteristics of the student culture or (sub)cultures in the engineering department where the Freeform system is being propagated? Based upon interviews with on-campus stakeholders (students, faculty, and staff), we constructed a 64-item survey to characterize the culture of their engineering department. We analyzed student responses using the cultural consensus theory model (CCT), a quantitative method that looks for patterns of responses to cultural statements. Grouped together, these patterns of responses indicate the values of the sub-cultures present within a participant group. Our results indicate that the best fitting model contains two student subcultures: student subculture 1 (SC1) (n = 15) and student subculture 2 (SC2) (n = 60). These two subcultures exhibit differences across a handful of items that focus on the student experience and in particular the sense of connectedness or belonging among students. Members of SC1 seem to be disconnected from both their peers and their instructors, work primarily alone, and seem to struggle to obtain access to academic assistance. SC1 members also feel overworked with (what they perceive to be) low-value-added activities, and they do not perceive alignment between how instructors teach and how they prefer to learn. In contrast, members of SC2 seem to be aligned with the institutional mission, which focuses on faculty-student relationships and learning in the community 

ABSTRACT CONTEXT Culture influences the dynamics and outcomes of organizations in profound ways, including individual-level outcomes (like the quality of work products) and collective impacts (such as reputation or influence). As such, understanding organizational culture is a crucial element of understanding performance; from an anthropological perspective, ‘performance’ is not an outcome of culture, it is a part of culture. A key challenge in understanding organizational culture, especially in complex academic organizations, is the lack of a flexible, scalable approach for data collection and analysis. PURPOSE OR GOAL In this study, we report on our development of a survey-based cultural characterization tool that leverages both lightweight data collection from stakeholders in the organization and public information about that organization. We also integrate perspectives from prior literature about faculty, students, and staff in academic departments. Taken together, the resulting survey covers key elements of culture and allows for scalable data collection across settings via customizations and embedded logic in the survey itself. The outcome of this work is a design process for a new and promising tool for scalable cultural characterization, and we have deployed this tool across two institutions. APPROACH OR METHODOLOGY/METHODS We leverage prior research, our own preliminary data collection, and our experience with this approach in a different setting to develop a cultural characterization survey suitable for delivery to multiple engineering department stakeholders (faculty, staff, and students). We start with a modest number of interviews, stratified by these three groups and achieving saturation of responses, to understand their views on their organization, its strengths and weaknesses, and their perceptions of how it ‘works’. We merge this information with public data (for instance, departmental vision or mission statements, which convey a sense of priorities or values) as well as prior literature about higher education culture. We also draw upon our experience in another setting as well as pilot testing data, and the result is a carefully-constructed set of dichotomous items that are offered to department stakeholders in survey form using an electronic survey platform. We also collect background and demographic information in the survey. The resulting data are analyzed using Cultural Consensus Theory (CCT) to extract meaningful information about the departmental culture from the perspectives of the stakeholder groups. ACTUAL OR ANTICIPATED OUTCOMES The resulting survey consists of two parts, each with sub-components. The two top level survey parts contain: (i) items common to all respondents in all settings (i.e. all institutions in this study), and (ii) a set of institution-specific items. Within those sections, the framing of the items is calibrated for the stakeholder groups so that items make sense to them within the context of their experience. The survey has been administered, and the data are being analyzed and interpreted presently. We expect the results to capture the specific elements of local culture within these institutions, as well as differences in perspectives and experience among the three primary stakeholder groups. CONCLUSIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS/SUMMARY This study demonstrates a scalable approach to survey development for the purposes of cultural characterization, and its use across settings and with multiple stakeholder groups. This work enables a very nuanced view of culture within a department, and these results can be used within academic departments to enable discussion about change, priorities, performance, and the work environment. 

ABSTRACT CONTEXT This paper examines an engineering dynamics course at Purdue University that was specifically designed to create an active, blended, and collaborative environment. In addition to in-person classes and support, students have access to blended content such as solution videos, mechanics visualizations, a course discussion forum, and interactive simulations. PURPOSE Many studies have shown that students’ engagement in an online discussion forum enhances their learning performance (Davies & Graff, 2005; Hrastinski, 2008). However, our previous research showed that students’ engagement in the online forum of our dynamics course differed significantly across students’ demographics. We showed that women, white, or Asian American students were more likely to be involved in online discussions than men, international, or Hispanic students (Duan et al., 2018). In this paper, we take the previous analysis further by examining whether the observed differences in online student engagement mediate or moderate student performance. APPROACH To answer our research question, we will first investigate the mediation effect by creating two models. A first model with race/international status as the mediating variable and gender identity as a control variable, and a second model with gender identity as the mediating variable and race/international status as a control. Second, we will investigate the moderation effect of demographic factors by creating a regression model including interaction terms to show the relationship of each demographic’s discussion forum engagement to overall performance. The goal of investigating these interaction terms is to determine if a moderating relationship exists where demographic factors impact online engagement, which in turn impact course performance. CONCLUSIONS We find that gender identity is the only significant demographic factor that moderates the effect of a student’s engagement on their performance. Based on the findings of our previous work, students of various racial and ethnic identities do engage differently in the discussion forum. However, this analysis was unable to detect any significant difference in student engagement based on demographics. Our paper contributes to understanding the mechanisms through which students’ engagement can translate into academic performance by focusing on their demographic background. The moderating role of students’ demographic background calls for a more targeted design of instructional tools in blended and collaborative environments to better support students from various demographic backgrounds. 

Over the past two decades, educators have used computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) to integrate technology with pedagogy to improve student engagement and learning outcomes. Researchers have also explored the diverse affordances of CSCL, its contributions to engineering instruction, and its effectiveness in K-12 STEM education. However, the question of how students use CSCL resources in undergraduate engineering classrooms remains largely unexplored. This study examines the affordances of a CSCL environment utilized in a sophomore dynamics course with particular attention given to the undergraduate engineering students’ use of various CSCL resources. The resources include a course lecturebook, instructor office hours, a teaching assistant help room, online discussion board, peer collaboration, and demonstration videos. This qualitative study uses semi-structured interview data collected from nine mechanical engineering students (four women and five men) who were enrolled in a dynamics course at a large public research university in Eastern Canada. The interviews focused on the individual student’s perceptions of the school, faculty, students, engineering courses, and implemented CSCL learning environment. The thematic analysis was conducted to analyze the transcribed interviews using a qualitative data analysis software (Nvivo). The analysis followed a six step process: (1) reading interview transcripts multiple times and preliminary in vivo codes; (2) conducting open coding by coding interesting or salient features of the data; (3) collecting codes and searching for themes; (4) reviewing themes and creating a thematic map; (5) finalizing themes and their definitions; and (6) compiling findings. This study found that the students’ use of CSCL resources varied depending on the students’ personal preferences, as well as their perceptions of the given resource’s value and its potential to enhance their learning. For example, the dynamics lecturebook, which had been redesigned to encourage problem solving and note-taking, fostered student collaborative problem solving with their peers. In contrast, the professor’s example video solutions had much more of an influence on students’ independent problem-solving processes. The least frequently used resource was the course’s online discussion forum, which could be used as a means of communication. The findings reveal how computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments enable engineering students to engage in multiple learning opportunities with diverse and flexible resources to both address and to clarify their personal learning needs. This study strongly recommends engineering instructors adapt a CSCL environment for implementation in their own unique classroom context.