The special session offers resources for developing effective propagation plans for educational innovations and opportunities to apply these resources. Organizations supporting development of innovations in engineering education are placing more emphasis now than previously on plans for propagating the innovation beyond the original developers. The goal of the special session is to help participants prepare effective propagation plans for proposals for innovative approaches for engineering education. The special session is organized using a framework that was generated from an evaluation of funded educational innovation development projects, a study of well-propagated innovations in undergraduate STEM education and review of the relevant literature on organizational change and diffusion of innovations.

This Research Work-in-progress paper presents a project that intends to increase student engagement, retention, and success through the implementation of a faculty development program focused on implicit bias and active learning. To assess the extent to which the program resulted in transformative changes in instructor teaching, the project team conducted classroom observations using minute-by-minute environmental scans and the Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS). The project team found that the COPUS could not capture all the behaviors that needed to be observed to assess the faculty development project. Thus, 12 emergent COPUS codes were developed to code the required behaviors. Each code is defined, examples are provided, and excerpts of classroom observations with and without the emergent COPUS codes are examined. The project team thinks the emergent COPUS codes, generally focused on faculty behaviors related to classroom climate, will be useful in other classroom observation projects.

The Editorial Board for the IEEE Transactions of Education developed and published a new set of review criteria. The review criteria have been built on the foundation of the areas of scholarship offered by Ernest Boyer. The purpose of this workshop is to help authors address the review criteria.

Systematic reviews are a new, fundamentally different approach to synthesizing engineering education research. The primary goal of the session is to increase the awareness and knowledge of engineering educators about systematic review methods. Systematic review methods, widely used in fields such as medicine, psychology and education, have only recently been applied in engineering education to analyze the state of the art. The paper presents steps to illustrate processes involved in a systematic review, sources of standards for systematic reviews, and strategies for information retrieval.

While scholarship in engineering education is growing in quality and quantity, the extent to which engineering education scholarship influences practice is hotly debated. Multiple factors influence the extent to which research influences practice in any field. While many highlight the reward system as the pivotal factor, changing the reward structure is difficult and assumes extrinsic motivators are effective for faculty. Therefore, this change alone is unlikely to affect faculty priorities vis-a-vis scholarship and teaching. The paper assumes two premises that provide necessary but not sufficient conditions for engineering education scholarship to influence practice. First, the authors assume that the reward system is at worst neutral and may at best reward faculty members who demonstrate they improve student's attainment of learning outcomes. Second, the authors assume that there are effective channels that provide engineering faculty members with concise, accessible, and effective information that they can use to make informed decisions about their teaching. Starting with these two premises, the authors claim another reason research is not influencing practice sufficiently is that, in the language of entrepreneurship, the engineering education community has not provided sufficiently compelling value propositions for engineering faculty members to adopt research based instructional strategies. While the value proposition of engineering education research is clear to researchers, it may not be clear for the majority of engineering faculty members who do not engage in these knowledge-creation activities. An untested claim of this paper is that research advances in engineering education need to be paired with minimum viable value propositions (MWPs) in order to influence practice in engineering classrooms. Herein the authors offer a set of preliminary adoption-based value propositions intended to stimulate active, substantive conversations.

Various technological, economic, and social developments may radically reshape engineering and computer science education in the next 20 to 30 years. Leaders in engineering education, such as IEEE, that play key roles must decide how they will innovate and support initiatives to improve engineering education. Decisions must be guided by both historical trends and potential future evolutions of engineering education. Since the future cannot be predicted, the organizations may be interested in methodologies to help make decisions. IEEE's Curriculum and Pedagogical Committee (CPC), which is charged with helping IEEE make solid decisions, engaged in a scenario planning exercise to help understand how various influences and trajectories could influence engineering education. Scenario planning methodology has been used by many organizations making long-term investments, to understand how future developments could be taken into account when making key decisions. The purpose of the workshop is to allow participants to experience some aspects of the scenario planning methodology and to compare their results with the results generated by the CPC.

Various technological, economic, and social developments may radically reshape engineering and computer science education in the next 20 to 30 years. Leaders in engineering education, such as IEEE, that play key roles must decide how they will innovate and support initiatives to improve engineering education. The IEEE's Curriculum and Pedagogical Committee (CPC), which is charged with helping IEEE forecast the future of engineering education and make decisions about IEEE's roles in preparing for and crafting that future, engaged in a scenario planning exercise to help understand how various influences and trajectories could influence engineering education. Scenario planning methodology has been used by many organizations making long-term investments. After considering influencers in the engineering education environment; important stakeholders and their roles; goals, constraints, and outcomes for key stakeholders; and potential uncertainties, the CPC identified two critical uncertainties over the next five years: (i) How will engineering programs innovate and adapt? (ii) What will be the values and competencies of engineering faculty? By considering two extremes for each of these uncertainties, the CPC crafted four scenarios, which are described in this paper, to characterize potential future trends and how different scenarios will influence the evolution of engineering education.

We want our students to understand and apply the concepts in each course. Therefore, we work hard to help our students master often-difficult concepts; however, our evaluation of their conceptual understanding often occurs simultaneously with evaluation of other learning goals through use of traditional problem-solving tests. Seldom do we measure pre-to-post learning gains. Often, instruments that would facilitate pre-to-post learning evaluation are not available. Creation, development, and use of such instruments would likely promote constructive conversations between engineering students and faculty members. Assessment instruments that have been designed to evaluate only conceptual understanding are often referred to as concept inventories, following a convention established by the Force Concept Inventory. Concept inventories have a range of possible uses, e.g., a pre-course diagnostic to understand conceptual understanding of students at the beginning of a course, early course formative assessment to guide instructional planning, summative assessment to evaluate conceptual understanding at the end of the course, and pre-post assessment to aid evaluation of instructional strategies. Concept inventories have been used at both course and program levels. What distinguishes concept inventories from typical engineering course assessment methods is focus on a small set of key constructs, focus on a specific domain of academic content, and focus on conceptual understanding or qualitative reasoning, as opposed to computational problem solving. Considerable scholarship informs selection of the situations, formulation of the question, and development of plausible distracters. During the workshop, participants will (i) be provided an overview of research on conceptual understanding, (ii) be provided an overview of the historical development of concept inventories, (iii) engage in activities to describe effective uses and some misuses of concept inventories in their courses, (iv) learn how to access existing concept inventories via the developing ciHUB.org platform, (v) discuss psychometric properties of existing instruments, (vi) learn how psychometric analysis can aid development of concept inventories, and (vii) have opportunities to become active members in a growing community of users.

A substantial percentage of the manuscripts submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Education as well as a substantial percentage of the papers that have been published fall within the scholarship of application as described by Boyer. The scholarship of application in electrical and computer engineering education might be briefly described as the scholarship of teaching practice in these disciplines. While this is a critical arena for electrical and computer engineering education, standards and criteria across the scholarly community for this area of scholarship have not been well established. Thus, this workshop at FIE 2013 offers opportunities for dialog about these issues. A starting point for the conversation will be the new review criteria that the Transactions has established for the scholarship of application. The intent of the workshop is to explore how authors interpret the new criteria, how authors might address the new criteria, and how support for authors can be fostered. Small groups will explore in greater depth the meaning of review criteria for the scholarship of application for education in electrical and computer engineering. Then, small groups with share their results with the large group for broader conversations.

The paper considers how research in product/process design methodologies can be used to design engineering curricula. Following the Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) framework for product design, we show how the curriculum design task can be separated into functionality of the curriculum, student behaviors and course structures. We then describe possible ways in which such a design could help us explore the possibilities of designing different types of curricula with the same functionality so that we could develop flexible, fault tolerant, scalable curricula that evolves with changing circumstances. These requirements are not generally included as curriculum design criteria and an approach that highlights the role of “robustness” would be useful.

Research in Engineering Education has led to the development and dissemination of a number of different instructional strategies (such as active learning, problem based learning, and concept tests) contributing to greater student learning in the classroom. However, there is little research to demonstrate how Research Based Instructional Strategies (RBIS) are being propagated from the developers to engineering faculty for use in the classroom. To examine the process of dissemination, this study uses Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation framework, which has traditionally been used to examine the dissemination of technological innovations through a population or organization. Rogers discusses five stages (knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation, and confirmation) of the innovation-decision process to explain how adopters make a decision about an innovation. To investigate faculty members' participation in the innovation-decision process, we conducted a survey of electrical, computer, and chemical engineering faculty (n = 221) teaching engineering sciences courses. The results show that ECE and ChE faculty members are located at a variety of stages throughout the innovation-decision process. However, most respondents have progressed past the knowledge phase; they are aware of the different RBIS. It is important to account for this when presenting an innovation or trying to encourage adoption of new practices, such as RBIS. It was found that workshops and presentations can influence the trial and use of RBIS when faculty are at the persuasion and decision stages. Also, women are more likely to try and use an RBIS than men. Many of the results found here are consistent with those found in a similar study done in physics education.

Based on research, constructing a program to increase accessibility for students with financial need, and diversity of students graduating with engineering baccalaureate degrees requires multiple components and partnerships to recruit, retain and graduate students. This paper describes how a program at Texas A&M University was initially constructed, how it has evolved, and what influences on student success have been observed.

In this paper, five major shifts in engineering education are identified. During the engineering science revolution, curricula moved from hands-on practice to mathematical modeling and scientific analyses. The first shift was initiated by engineering faculty members from Europe; accelerated during World War II, when physicists contributed multiple engineering breakthroughs; codified in the Grinter report; and kick-started by Sputnik. Did accreditation hinder curricular innovations? Were engineering graduates ready for practice? Spurred by these questions, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) required engineering programs to formulate outcomes, systematically assess achievement, and continuously improve student learning. The last three shifts are in progress. Since the engineering science revolution may have marginalized design, a distinctive feature of engineering, faculty members refocused attention on capstone and first-year engineering design courses. However, this third shift has not affected the two years in between. Fourth, research on learning and education continues to influence engineering education. Examples include learning outcomes and teaching approaches, such as cooperative learning and inquiry that increase student engagement. In shift five, technologies (e.g., the Internet, intelligent tutors, personal computers, and simulations) have been predicted to transform education for over 50 years; however, broad transformation has not yet been observed. Together, these five shifts characterize changes in engineering education over the past 100 years.

In problem-based learning and related approaches, a faculty member organizes course content around posing several situations to students and presenting them questions, challenges, problems, or projects drawn from the situation. A faculty member presents the problem and asks for student solution fragments before lecturing on relevant course content. Then, the faculty member facilitates student teams as they work through a process to answer the question. Content is selected, organized, and presented to help students address each posed challenge. Many studies have offered results that faculty members can use to evaluate the efficacy of a problem-based learning approach to teaching and decide whether to apply the approach for their courses. However, the proposed manuscript offers a different line of reasoning to advocate problem-based learning. Reasoning begins with a two-by-two, process-content matrix, which is very similar to the two-by-two, innovation-efficiency matrix used to characterize adaptive expertise. If student development were characterized as a trajectory in a two-dimensional, innovation-efficiency space, then questions such as the following could be raised: What characterizes more time-efficient trajectories to reach adaptive expertise? The proposed manuscript will use this line of reasoning to explore how problem-based learning may offer a time-efficient approach to developing adaptive expertise.

Anecdotally, engineering faculty members complain students taking sophomore engineering science courses are not prepared with respect to mathematics and mechanics-based physics. However, evidence has rarely been systematically collected and analyzed to determine the veracity of these assertions. Therefore, the paper intends to address two questions: 1) With respect to first-year mathematics and first-year physics mechanics knowledge, what do engineering faculty members expect students to know and be able to do when they begin a sophomore statics and dynamics course? 2) To what extent do students satisfy these expectations? To address these questions, the following steps were taken. First, engineering faculty members who taught a sophomore statics and dynamics course at Texas A&M University were asked for problems involving first-year mathematics and physics mechanics they thought students should be able to solve entering the course. Learning outcomes were abstracted, and two instruments were developed and administered near the beginning of the statics and dynamics course. After administering the instruments and analyzing results, faculty members have a better idea of the background of their students. Furthermore, there is evidence to examine the extent to which students are prepared in first-year mathematics and physics mechanics to begin a core engineering science course.