BOARD # 230: CATENA: An IUSE:EDU project to evaluate STEM education capacity through social network analysis
- Conference
- Location
-
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- Publication Date
-
June 22, 2025
- Start Date
-
June 22, 2025
- End Date
-
August 15, 2025
- Conference Session
- Tagged Topic
-
NSF Grantees Poster Session
- Page Count
-
5
- Permanent URL
-
https://peer.asee.org/55589
Paper Authors
John Ray Morelock
University of Georgia
orcid.org/0000-0001-8043-5060
Dr. Morelock is an Assistant Professor of Practice with an emphasis on engineering education research, and the Associate Director of Educational Innovation and Impact for UGA's Engineering Education Transformations Institute (EETI). In addition to coordinating EETI’s faculty development programming, Dr. Morelock conducts research on institutional change via faculty development, with an emphasis on innovative ways to cultivate and evaluate supportive teaching and learning networks in engineering departments and colleges. He received his doctoral degree in Engineering Education at Virginia Tech, where he was a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. His dissertation studied the teaching practices of engineering instructors during game-based learning activities, and how these practices affected student motivation.
VARUN KATHPALIA University of Georgia
Varun Kathpalia, born and raised in northern part of India, joined EETI as a PhD student in the Spring of 2024.
He completed his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from Chitkara Institute of Engineering and Technology (Punjab Technical University, India) and master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, specializing in Manufacturing & Materials Science Engineering, from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India. He has over 4 years of corporate experience with companies such as Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Pvt. Ltd. and Saint-Gobain India Pvt. Ltd. (Research & Development). His interest in areas such as improvement in instructional techniques, faculty perspectives and teaching methodologies, drove him towards the domain of Engineering Education. Specifically, the question of how engineering education can be made more effective and engaging fascinated and motivated him to pursue research in this domain.
He is working with his major professor on an NSF funded project dealing with communities and relationships that enable and empower faculty and students in engineering.
Abstract
The paper overviews a new IUSE:EDU project to develop a social network analysis (SNA) instrument that will allow STEM education centers to assess the otherwise intangible concept of STEM education capacity. STEM education capacity refers to the ability and empowerment of STEM educators to adapt to changing needs and collectively achieve shared objectives of their organizations. STEM education capacity is an important property of any academic system in STEM disciplines. It characterizes the readiness of the system’s members, communities, and the organization as a whole to adapt educational practices effectively to changing circumstances. However, it is also a latent system property, meaning that STEM education capacity can only be observed when it is in action. Most commonly, academic units see capacity in action during times of crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. In such times of crisis, it is too late to intervene and develop capacity to more effectively deal with the crisis. We argue that STEM education capacity can be more proactively be observed in mundane interactions between peers. SNA is a promising tool to be able to capture and quantify these interactions, allowing STEM education leaders to anticipate capacity development opportunities to better prepare for times of crisis or change.
The project is in its first phase of three, in which we use qualitative interviewing to identify the kinds of relationships and interactions that matter to STEM education capacity building. We interviewed fifteen engineering faculty and staff involved in the teaching and learning process in one university’s College of Engineering. We aimed to understand who they talked to about teaching and learning, how their relationships developed, and what kinds of conversation they have most often. These interviews helped us deduce how engineering educators grow, learn, change, and help others through their interactions with other educators. The results of this phase of research yielded important insights about the ways networks of educators grow and solidify in STEM higher education. They also revealed the kinds of interactions relevant to individual growth and systemic capacity building.
The next project phase will develop a SNA instrument that can capture the kinds of interactions relevant to STEM education capacity building. The final project phase will validate the instrument via its deployment across the entire College of Engineering. At the end of the project, STEM education leaders will have a tool they can use to assess, study, and grow STEM education capacity in their contexts. We call this tool the CATENA Instrument (Capacity Assessment, Tracking, & Enhancement through Network Analysis). This paper and NSF grantees poster will introduce the project as a whole, and also describe our Phase 1 results.
Morelock, J. R., & KATHPALIA, V. (2025, June), BOARD # 230: CATENA: An IUSE:EDU project to evaluate STEM education capacity through social network analysis Paper presented at 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Montreal, Quebec, Canada . https://peer.asee.org/55589
ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2025 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015