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Are All ‘EBIPs’ Created Equal? An Exploration of Engineering Faculty Adoption of Nine Evidence-Based Instructional Practices

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Conference

2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Baltimore , Maryland

Publication Date

June 25, 2023

Start Date

June 25, 2023

End Date

June 28, 2023

Conference Session

Faculty Development Division (FDD) Technical Session 12

Tagged Division

Faculty Development Division (FDD)

Page Count

16

DOI

10.18260/1-2--42287

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/42287

Download Count

104

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Paper Authors

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Amy L Brooks Oregon State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-9949-579X

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Dr. Amy Brooks is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Oregon State University School of Civil and Construction Engineering and member of the Beyond Professional Identity lab at Harding University. Her current research is using interpretative phenomenological analysis to understand well-being and experiences with professional shame among engineering faculty. She is also part of a research team investigating context-specific affordances and barriers faculty face when adopting evidence-based instructional practices in their engineering courses. Amy's research interests meet at the intersection of sustainable and resilient infrastructure, emotions in engineering, and engineering identity formation.

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Jeff Knowles

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Dr. Jeff Knowles is an engineering instructor at Oregon State University who began teaching courses in 2015. His current pedagogical research is related to barriers associated with implementing Evidence-Based Instructional Practices (EBIPs) in STEM-related courses and determining what affordances can be granted to overcome such contextual obstacles. Jeff's interests also include the numerical modeling of nonlinear wave phenomena.

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Elliott Clement Oregon State University

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Elliott Clement is a doctoral student at Oregon State University. His current research is using grounded theory to understand identity and motivation within the context of capstone design courses. He is also part of a research team investigating context-specific affordances and barriers faculty face when adopting evidence-based instructional practices in their engineering courses.

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Prateek Shekhar New Jersey Institute of Technology Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-6552-2887

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Prateek Shekhar is an Assistant Professor - Engineering Education division at New Jersey Institute of Technology. His research is focused on examining translation of engineering education research in practice, assessment and evaluation of dissemination initiatives and educational programs in engineering disciplines. He holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, M.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of Southern California and B.S. in Electronics and Communication Engineering from India.

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Shane A. Brown, P.E. Oregon State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-3669-8407

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Shane Brown is an associate professor and Associate School Head in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Oregon State University. His research interests include conceptual change and situated cognition. He received the NSF CAREER award in

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Abstract

Evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs) such as active, problem-based, and case-based learning have widely been shown to improve student learning and success in the classroom. Previous research has found that most engineering faculty have some knowledge or awareness of EBIPs and the benefits of using them in their courses. However, uptake of EBIPs in engineering courses is lagging among engineering faculty, with fewer faculty members reporting the consistent incorporation of these instructional methods in their classrooms. Research has pinpointed challenges to adopting EBIPs in engineering courses such as the perception of lacking evidence to support using instructional practices, requiring too much time to prepare or implement in class, negative reactions from students, or scarce institutional resources or support. While these are common barriers tied to engaging non-traditional forms of pedagogy, a thorough investigation of the challenges frequently associated with individual EBIPs is a distinguishing factor that warrants further exploration within the engineering education setting.

To this end, the present study is guided by the overarching exploratory research question: How do barriers and affordances to adoption of EBIPs by engineering faculty vary between EBIP types? To address this research question and provide contextual insight into variation of adoption approaches between EBIPs, we distributed an online survey to engineering faculty members across the USA that was administered between April and June 2022. The survey was adapted from existing research in EBIP adoption among engineering faculty and gathered information about respondent demographics, teaching practice and experience with EBIPs, and interest in participating in future research activities. For the present study, we focused analysis on responses to an open-ended qualitative question asking respondents to describe factors that have or could prevent them from adopting nine different EBIPs including active learning, case-based teaching, collaborative learning, concept tests, cooperative learning, inquiry learning, just-in-time teaching, peer instruction, and problem-based learning.

We received a total of 400 completed responses to the survey. Of these, 149 respondents answered at least one open-ended question associated with each of the nine EBIPs. The number of responses to each EBIP question ranged from 40 responses about peer instruction to 85 responses about active learning resulting in a data corpus of 10,952 words and a total of 504 coded comments. An inductive approach was used to code the response data with first and second cycle coding methods. Codes were ultimately reduced to themes that illuminated variation in engineering faculty descriptions of barriers that are contextually relevant to each of the nine EBIPs. For example, context specific challenges for adopting case-based teaching involve the substantial time it takes to find cases and assess their utility, as well as adapting them to computation-intensive courses such as engineering statics or thermodynamics. In contrast, some participants described barriers with incorporating concept tests related to student apathy that led to disengagement and a lack of critical thinking. In the forthcoming paper, we will report our findings for each EBIP type along with their associated barriers, which will inform a larger effort to address contextual challenges to EBIP adoption and develop solutions which may be modified to satisfy requirements on a classroom by classroom basis.

Brooks, A. L., & Knowles, J., & Clement, E., & Shekhar, P., & Brown,, S. A. (2023, June), Are All ‘EBIPs’ Created Equal? An Exploration of Engineering Faculty Adoption of Nine Evidence-Based Instructional Practices Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--42287

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