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Session 1630

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Faculty Workshops

Russell L. Pimmel Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, AL

Abstract

Faculty workshops provide an efficient, economical approach for disseminating the many new ideas and approaches created in the engineering education research and development efforts. Usually, workshop leaders use post-workshop surveys in a formative evaluation process to determine the participants’ likes and dislikes, but data on the effect of the workshop on the participants’ awareness, understanding, and implementation of these new ideas are lacking. The present report outlines a process for collecting summative evaluation data and provides some results from eight workshops, showing that they can impact faulty development.

Introduction

Engineering education research and development efforts have led to many new ideas and approaches for improving teaching and learning. Faculty workshops, typically lasting two to four hours, have become a common approach for disseminating these new concepts and approaches in engineering education. The recent increases in workshop activity at the ASEE and FIE national meetings and the appearance of special workshop conferences, such as the Share the Future Conference (1), provide evidence of this new emphasis. In addition, many individual institutions are now organizing workshops to introduce their faculty to these ideas. Although the short- duration workshop has become a standard approach for dissemination, there are no data on the effectiveness of them in changing attitudes and behavior.

Most workshop leaders conduct some form of post workshop evaluation, but these are usually formative, intending to provide information for improving the workshop. They address questions like: “How the workshop could be improved to better meet the participants’ goals (or needs)?”, "What the participants liked (or disliked)?”, and so on. Usually, there is little attempt to evaluate the effect of the workshop on the participants’ attitudes toward the workshop concepts, their understanding of these concepts, their commitment to using these concepts, and actual changes in their behavior. In other words, these formative post workshop evaluations can not assess the effect on the participants’ attitude or behavior, as a summative assessment would do. This paper describes an effort to begin collecting this summative data

There is little in the literature on summative evaluations of engineering faculty workshops. The NSF commissioned a fairly extensive evaluation of the workshops it sponsored under the

Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2003, American Society for Engineering Education

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Pimmel, R. (2003, June), Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Faculty Workshops Paper presented at 2003 Annual Conference, Nashville, Tennessee. 10.18260/1-2--11730