IGE: Learning the Entire Pipeline: Analyzing and Improving Graduate Engineering Education through Communities of Practice

This National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) award to North Carolina State University will support groundbreaking research on how graduate students in critical Engineering domains learn to put academic knowledge into practice while working in diverse, interdisciplinary teams. In order to prepare students to transfer their classroom experiences to professional practice, engineering education needs to improve students’ ability to work in multidisciplinary teams, deal with diverse opinions, ideas, and backgrounds, and broaden their education to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global context.

This project adopts a highly developed theoretical framework called “communities of practice” (CoP) and applies, researches, and further extends CoP theory in graduate classes across Civil Engineering, Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering. This approach has a strong emphasis on collaboration, teamwork, knowledge as doing, and communication across disciplinary and cultural backgrounds.

By applying this approach in three engineering courses from three different engineering departments at North Carolina State University, this project will yield insights around student interactions and learning within different team settings: 1) integration into a professional engineering environment, studying how students interact with professionals and how the academic and professional communities learn from their encounters; 2) engagement in interdisciplinary projects in teams that bring together two disciplinary communities; and 3) engagement in interdisciplinary projects with teams that work on subsystems which need to be integrated into one working whole. This project will focus on how diversity plays out in CoPs, examine what factors lead to productive participation by all, what challenges inhibit participation and investigate approaches to structuring academic CoPs to support equitable learning and contributions by all.

Through this approach which involves various settings and granularities in three different courses, this project will develop a broader view of how engineering students learn in different team settings. The proposed approach can help to bridge the gap between theory and practice, facilitating the development of a workforce that can work within and across teams, projects, and domains.

To help apply the proposed approaches to other disciplines, we will develop and disseminate a set of guidelines in our future publications and presentations.

The Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program is focused on research in graduate education. The goals of IGE are to pilot, test, and validate innovative approaches to graduate education and to generate the knowledge required to move these approaches into the broader community.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.