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Board 82: Sustaining Change: Embedding Research Outcomes into School Practices, Policies, and Norms

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Conference

2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Tampa, Florida

Publication Date

June 15, 2019

Start Date

June 15, 2019

End Date

June 19, 2019

Conference Session

NSF Grantees Poster Session

Tagged Topic

NSF Grantees Poster Session

Page Count

9

DOI

10.18260/1-2--32439

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/32439

Download Count

273

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Paper Authors

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Milo Koretsky Oregon State University

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Milo Koretsky is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at Oregon State University. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from UC San Diego and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, all in Chemical Engineering. He currently has research activity in areas related engineering education and is interested in integrating technology into effective educational practices and in promoting the use of higher-level cognitive skills in engineering problem solving. His research interests particularly focus on what prevents students from being able to integrate and extend the knowledge developed in specific courses in the core curriculum to the more complex, authentic problems and projects they face as professionals. Dr. Koretsky is one of the founding members of the Center for Lifelong STEM Education Research at OSU.

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Susan Bobbitt Nolen University of Washington Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-2240-4447

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Professor of Learning Sciences & Human Development

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Christine Kelly Oregon State University

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Dr. Kelly earned her BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Arizona and her PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Tennessee. She served as an Assistant Professor for 6 years at Syracuse University, and has been an Associate Professor at Oregon State University in the School of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering since 2004, where she also served for three and half years as the Associate Dean for Academic and Student Affairs of the College of Engineering.

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Susannah C. Davis Oregon State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-4610-8052

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Susannah C. Davis is a postdoctoral research associate in the School of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering at Oregon State University. She received her Ph.D. and M.Ed. from the University of Washington, and her B.A. from Smith College. She is currently working on the NSF-funded REvolutionizing engineering and computer science Departments (RED) project at OSU. Her research focuses on organizational learning and change, particularly in higher education; learning in the workplace; curricular and pedagogical development; and the preparation of professionals for social justice goals.

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Michelle Kay Bothwell Oregon State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-4501-8533

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Michelle Bothwell is an Associate Professor of Bioengineering at Oregon State University. Her teaching and research bridge ethics, social justice and engineering with the aim of cultivating an inclusive and socially just engineering profession.

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Devlin Montfort Oregon State University

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Dr. Montfort is an Assistant Professor in the School of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering at Oregon State University

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Ed LeRoy Michor Oregon State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-1951-790X

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Ed is currently a postdoctoral scholar at Oregon State University, working with Prof. Milo Koretsky. He had previously worked as a process development engineer at Intel in Hillsboro, OR. He received his PhD and Master's in Chemical Engineering from University of Washington, under the academic guidance of Prof. John C. Berg, while studying the charging behavior of colloids in nonpolar media. He received a Bachelor's in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota, where he studied with Profs. Aditya Bhan and Lanny Schmidt. His current research involves the characterization of student engagement with realistic and contextualized activities in order to better situate students as professional engineers.

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Abstract

With an NSF Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments (RED) grant, the School of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering seeks to create (1) a culture where everyone in the CBEE community feels a sense of value and belonging, and (2) to create a learning environment that prompts students and faculty to meaningfully relate curricular and co-curricular activities and experiences to each other and to connect both with professional practice. In this fourth year of the grant we are emphasizing embedding our reforms into the processes and routine practices of the School. This paper discusses these efforts in the context of the School community and the curricula and teaching practices.

School community

We have developed a survey instrument to assess student perceptions of climate, and delivered the survey for the second year. We have taken the feedback and integrated the perspectives with the annual assessments we use for continuous improvement and accreditation. We discussed this integrated feedback with the faculty. We will continue to embed the climate survey into the standard operations of the assessment committee. The climate survey revealed that while students perceived the School climate as generally welcoming, students from all social identity groups rated the climate as significantly more welcoming for students from dominant (white, male, US-born) than nondominant (all other social identities) groups. Both quantitative survey analysis and qualitative analysis of open-ended responses on the survey highlighted the importance of peer relations in students’ perceptions of climate and engineering identity. We are soliciting ideas and concepts from faculty and staff to improve School and College policies, norms and practices toward a more just workplace. Faculty and staff will opt in to participate on projects they are interested in, led by faculty who have participated in the ADVANCE training (funded by this project) on difference, power and discrimination. Our assessments have identified that international students experience the culture of CBEE less positively than domestic students. To address this challenge, in the final two years of the project we will be working with key students and staff to identify interventions and support mechanisms to benefit international students.

Curricula and Teaching Practices

In the past year of the grant, considerable effort was invested in analyzing students working in teams on re-situated activities in 11 studio course courses, testing a variety of teaming activities with senior students and soliciting their feedback, and creating a Teaching Innovation Fellows program for School faculty to work on common issues by participating in one or more of several new professional learning communities or by engaging in action research. We have expanded the use and professional development of near-peer Learning Assistants to facilitate course continuous improvement. We are video recording students as they engage in re-situated Studio 2.0 activities and comparing groups to one another and to how they engage in the previous Studio 1.0 activities to inform both activity development and instructional practice. We are piloting an alternative leads model in select studio courses where two faculty share a course assignment with one orienting towards that year’s delivery and the other taking responsibility for curricular innovation and instructional practice. The alternate leads presents a strategy to institute innovation and issues of practice as a core instructional activity rather than work supported by external funds.

The third and fourth year of the grant is characterized by a focus on institutional transformation – embedding practices, processes, course structures, and policies that will continue beyond the duration of the grant with the goals of building an inclusive culture for students, faculty and staff, and creating a professionally-based learning environment that promotes development of student’s skills to navigate the world of engineering.

Koretsky, M., & Nolen, S. B., & Kelly, C., & Davis, S. C., & Bothwell, M. K., & Montfort, D., & Michor, E. L. (2019, June), Board 82: Sustaining Change: Embedding Research Outcomes into School Practices, Policies, and Norms Paper presented at 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Tampa, Florida. 10.18260/1-2--32439

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