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Principal investigators and project teams funded by the National Science Foundation are familiar with the requirement to discuss the impact of their research. Whether the discussion appears in a new proposal, or as part of annual or final reporting, describing the impacts of a project is key to demonstrating the value of the work itself. PIs and project teams may not, however, consider the ways in which their reporting on impacts can help them disseminate their work to stakeholders and propagate their innovations to other researchers. Impact statements can also be useful to NSF program officers who are often in the position of informing about and advocating for the projects under their management. Consequently, our work to support the NSF Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) program helps project teams develop more coherent and persuasive impact statements. These impact statements lay the foundation for teams to persuasively disseminate their work. As part of our work to support the NSF Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) program, we have developed an impacts tutorial that helps proposal and report writers capture what is impactful about their projects and to communicate that impact to multiple audiences (e.g., the NSF program officer, stakeholders for the project, etc.). We piloted the tutorial during the 2019 RED Consortium Meeting to the 21 RED teams in attendance. The tutorial began with a clear statement of the purpose of impact statements generally that was included in a printed workbook distributed to all attendees. From that starting point, groups made up of representatives from different RED teams worked to draft responses to the NSF Annual Report question prompts that address impacts. Initial feedback from NSF about this session have been positive and indicate improvements in reporting by RED teams. During our poster presentation at ASEE, we will introduce this method of writing impact statements, share elements of the workbook, and help attendees apply the method to their own NSF reporting. 

At the start of their work for the National Science Foundation’s Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) Program (IUSE/Professional Formation of Engineers, NSF 19-614), RED teams face a variety of challenges. Not only must they craft a shared vision for their projects and create strategic partnerships across their campuses to move the project forward, they must also form a new team and communicate effectively within the team. Our work with RED teams over the past 5 years has highlighted the common challenges these teams face at the start, and for that reason, we have developed the RED Start Up Session, a ½ day workshop that establishes best practices for RED teams’ work and allows for early successes in these five year projects. As the RED Participatory Action Research team (REDPAR)--comprised of individuals from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and the University of Washington--we have taken the research data collected as we work with RED teams and translated it into practical strategies that can benefit RED teams as they embark on their projects. This presentation will focus on the content and organization of the Start Up Session and how these lessons learned can contribute to the furthering of the goals of the RED program: to design “revolutionary new approaches to engineering education,” focusing on “organizational and cultural change within the departments, involving students, faculty, staff, and industry in rethinking what it means to provide an engineering program.” We see the Start Up Session as an important first step in the RED team establishing an identity as a team and learning how to work effectively together. We also encourage new RED teams to learn from the past, through a panel discussion with current RED team members who fill various roles on the teams: engineering education researcher, project manager, project PI, disciplinary faculty, social scientist, and others. By presenting our findings from the Start Up Session at ASEE, we believe we can contribute to the national conversation regarding change in engineering education as it is evidenced in the RED team’s work. 

Shared vision is an important process for change projects, serving to amplify success, increase participation, and erode the divide between project leaders and constituents. Yet there are few empirical examinations of the process of building shared vision within academic departments. Using focus groups and participant observation, this study examines shared vision development within 13 large-scale change projects in engineering and computer science higher education. We find that teams of faculty, staff, administrators, and students built shared vision with stakeholders through co-orientation, formational communication, and recognition of stakeholder autonomy. Our results delineate practices for developing shared vision for academic change projects and demonstrate the benefits of inclusive stakeholder empowerment.