BCSER: Exploring Faculty Perception and Self-efficacy in Lab-intensive Online Courses

This capacity-building project is designed to develop the investigator's knowledge and skills as a STEM education researcher through intensive training followed by the design and implementation of a study to investigate the perceptions and self-efficacy of engineering faculty members who teach lab-intensive STEM courses online. The multifaceted professional development plan comprises coursework in educational research, workshops, and mentoring by a team of education researchers.

The research is designed to use a mixed methods approach. Data will be collected through a survey of 140 engineering instructors plus interviews of five of the survey respondents. The research findings will add to the body of knowledge on faculty members’ perception and self-efficacy in online teaching.

It will also provide insight into factors that may be impeding the growth of engineering and engineering technology programs.

Surveys of thousands of postsecondary programs in the United States indicate that lab-intensive programs show a significantly lower rate of online implementation. However, study of the factors contributing to this trend has been limited. Using a sequential explanatory mixed methods approach, this project will probe the underlying factors influencing faculty members’ perception and self-efficacy in teaching lab-intensive online courses.

The first phase of the study will survey 140 faculty members on these two constructs. The second phase will employ convenience and maximum variations sampling strategies to purposefully select five faculty for participation in semi-structured follow-up interviews to further explore survey findings. The researcher will develop his knowledge and skills in STEM education research through intensive professional development and will hone these through the experience of designing and conducting the aforementioned study.

This project is supported by the ECR Building Capacity in STEM Education Research competition of the EHR Core Research (ECR) program. ECR funds fundamental STEM education research projects that focus on STEM learning and learning environments,broadening participation in STEM fields, and STEM professional workforce development.

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.