Workshop: ProVis-EER: Developing Professional Vision into Empirical Practices within Engineering Education Research (EER) though Digital Apprenticeship

The preparation of a future engineering workforce depends critically on our ability to provide excellence in training and through our efforts to train a broad range of stakeholders for the engineering profession. Increasingly within the United States institutions are creating programs, courses, and centers to support the preparation of the future engineer.

This institutional and education infrastructure depends on a better and deeper understanding of how engineering education works best in order to support their efforts and initiatives. This project will contribute to this mission by increasing and improving the capacity of engineering educators to undertake research on engineering education. Through this series of workshops newcomers to the field will be able to learn first-hand from scholar-experts in the field.

The online nature of the workshops will ensure that a large number of participants are able to undergo the sessions. Furthermore, the resources created as part of this project will be available for future training purposes. Overall, this work is crucial for the growing field of engineering education and the ability of future engineering educators to learn from a wide range of scholar-experts will broaden the kinds of research that are done as well as the outcomes of the research.

This project aligns with NSF’s investment in the Research in Formation of Engineers (RFE) program by creating better engineering education researchers that can support the training of future engineers and who can undertake better research for us to know how to create an engineering workforce for the future.

Building capacity for engineering education research (EER) is a core goal of NSF and organizations such as the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). Over the past decade the community has made significant gains towards achieving this objective as evidenced by increasing number of departments and centers directed towards engineering education across institutions.

Propagation of EER practices has largely been through face-to-face interactions, including doctoral programs, working in research laboratories, and workshops and tutorials at professional development meetings. These in person engagements and events are prohibitive for many who would benefit from developing a better understanding of how research is conducted.

They also limit new researchers in exposure to a broader set of views and research practices. This proposed series of digital workshops are designed as a “swift apprenticeship” experiences to increase the formation of EER practitioners by creating exemplars of engineering education research practices that take the learner through the entire lifecycle of a project and provide an avenue for learning by example, scaffolded by experts.

Experts will focus on one of their exemplary published research papers and deconstruct/reconstruct how that research was done and the paper produced including matters of theory, methods, and review. The reconstruction will take place as a conversation with the PI/s which will be captured on video and audio and drafts of papers and other relevant artifacts will be collected and shared.

It will also invite questions from a set of novice participants and commentary from other experts to provide another viewpoint and additional context on research practices. This project will benefit engineering education graduate students, engineering graduate students and faculty in other disciplines interested in engineering education research, and postdoctoral scholars.

This work will contribute to research on engineering education, especially the use of professional vision and scaffolding for novices, and on transfer learning for research practices.

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.