Collaborative Research: Design for Impact - Creating Effective Student Activities that Faculty Will Use

协作研究：影响力设计 - 创建教师将使用的有效学生活动

• 批准号: 1225221
• 负责人: Milo Koretsky
• 金额: $ 15万
• 依托单位: Oregon State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-09-01 至 2018-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1225221&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Design; Impact; Creating

Developing students' understanding of fundamental concepts is a primary goal of undergraduate engineering education. Innovations such as concept questions, model-eliciting activities, and inquiry-based instruction have consistently been found to be more effective for promoting conceptual change. However, these innovative approaches were designed with educational effectiveness as the foremost (or only) concern. Considerably less research has been devoted to understanding how to design these activities to increase their adoption by engineering faculty. The primary challenge facing engineering reform today is not primarily to develop more effective instructional strategies but to find ways to get faculty to adopt instructional techniques that we already know to be more effective than the traditional methods still found in the majority of undergraduate engineering classrooms. This project addresses that challenge by identifying methods of developing instructional modules that are simultaneously effective for student learning gains and faculty adoptability. This project is developing instructional materials for heat transfer, an important foundational course for chemical, mechanical and other engineering majors. It is combining the research on student learning of fundamental concepts with research on adoption and change to develop materials that professors are more likely to actually use in their classes. The materials are being evaluated for "usability" by a panel of professors at different types of institutions who work with a diverse range of engineering student populations. Ongoing evaluation of the project is monitoring the most frequently downloaded activities and relating this information to factors that promote faculty adoption. The literature on diffusion of innovation into the college classroom identifies several factors that inhibit adoption of new approaches. These include faculty concerns about (1) preparation time, (2) class time, (3) effectiveness, (4) student resistance, (5) inflexible teaching environments and (6) inability to adapt innovations to suit their needs. There is therefore a need to develop approaches that minimize these identified barriers so that effective practices are more widely adopted and consequently provide broad impact. The findings of this project will inform future efforts to promote faculty adoption of new instructional practices in other STEM areas.

培养学生对基本概念的理解是本科工程教育的首要目标。人们一直发现概念问题、模型引发活动和基于探究的教学等创新对于促进概念变革更有效。然而，这些创新方法的设计以教育效果为首要（或唯一）关注点。致力于了解如何设计这些活动以提高工程学院采用率的研究要少得多。今天工程改革面临的主要挑战不是制定更有效的教学策略，而是找到方法让教师采用我们已经知道比大多数本科工程课堂中仍然存在的传统方法更有效的教学技术。该项目通过确定开发教学模块的方法来应对这一挑战，这些模块同时对学生的学习收益和教师的采用率有效。本项目正在开发传热学教材，这是化学、机械等工科专业的重要基础课。它将学生学习基本概念的研究与采用和变革的研究结合起来，以开发教授更有可能在课堂上实际使用的材料。这些材料的“可用性”正在由不同类型机构的教授小组进行评估，这些教授与不同范围的工程专业学生群体一起工作。该项目的持续评估正在监控最常下载的活动，并将这些信息与促进教师采用的因素联系起来。关于创新扩散到大学课堂的文献指出了阻碍采用新方法的几个因素。其中包括教师对（1）准备时间、（2）上课时间、（3）有效性、（4）学生抵制、（5）不灵活的教学环境以及（6）无法适应创新以满足他们的需求的担忧。因此，有必要制定尽量减少这些已确定的障碍的方法，以便更广泛地采用有效的做法，从而产生广泛的影响。该项目的研究结果将为未来促进教师在其他 STEM 领域采用新教学实践的努力提供信息。