| NSF Org: |
EEC Division of Engineering Education and Centers |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | June 9, 2015 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | September 20, 2016 |
| Award Number: | 1519438 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Kemi Ladeji-Osias
jladejio@nsf.gov (703)292-7708 EEC Division of Engineering Education and Centers ENG Directorate for Engineering |
| Start Date: | July 1, 2015 |
| End Date: | June 30, 2021 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $1,988,663.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $1,988,663.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
601 S HOWES ST FORT COLLINS CO US 80521-2807 (970)491-6355 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
200 W Lake Street Fort Collins CO US 80521-4593 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
PFE\RED - Professional Formati, IUSE |
| Primary Program Source: |
04001516DB NSF Education & Human Resource |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.041 |
ABSTRACT
The current engineering educational system fails in two fundamentally critical ways. First, students who have the desire and aptitude to become accomplished and productive engineers are abandoning the discipline in startling numbers. Second, students who graduate are frequently not prepared for the realities of their chosen profession and are switching careers at alarming rates. A team of educators at Colorado State University propose a new organizational model that looks at the undergraduate electrical and computer engineering (ECE) degree as an integrated system, breaking down the barriers inherent in higher education structures and implementing novel pedagogical approaches that allow students of all backgrounds to see the utility of their knowledge and connections to professional practice. At the pedagogical level, the new approach combines rigor and flexibility in engineering education to improve student efficacy and content knowledge integration through building communities of learning and practice. At the organizational level, the transformational approach aims to energize faculty to collaboratively weave important knowledge and application threads throughout the curriculum, while utilizing a new learning model that connects disparate anchoring concepts. Whether demonstrating the relevance of content through research, labs, or hands-on projects, the ECE faculty will work as a multifaceted team, ensuring that every educational component gives consideration to the big picture, while simultaneously instilling a deep knowledge of the discipline. Colorado State's approach is expected to reverse the attrition trend in engineering education and fill the engineering pathway with motivated students of diverse backgrounds. These students will have the mastery of fundamental engineering knowledge, while being ready and excited to apply their knowledge to real-world applications. The pedagogical and organizational innovations provide a broad framework for transformative and sustainable changes in engineering departments, which are necessary to produce professional engineers of the future. Moreover, the approach builds a community of universities, community colleges, and industry partners for wide participation of effective teaching and learning. CSU's approach will propel a new engineering workforce that generates superior ideas, products, and services, ultimately contributing to the nation's economic vitality and global competitiveness.
Colorado State's proposed model incorporates transformative innovation in engineering education that yields an inclusive environment that is characterized by rigor and flexibility. The new approach utilizes learning studios with modules that build on the concept of "nanocourses" and emphasizes knowledge integration - which is a learning model that is well grounded in pedagogy and supported by education research. CSU's efforts will span the entire undergraduate electrical and computer engineering experience, with special attention to the critical technical core of the middle two years. While area-specific learning modules have been in existence for years, such modules are usually supplements to the core curriculum and do not typically cover fundamental subjects vital to comprehending abstract topics; nor do they stitch together anchoring concepts to lay the groundwork for real-world applications. Key to the new approach is its: latitudinal knowledge integration, which will be used to link fundamental concepts and illustrate the utility of topics using applications students are familiar with (e.g., the smartphone, digital camera, and high-speed internet), consonant with research recommendations from the cognitive sciences. Furthermore, the pedagogical innovation of the new approach is accompanied by organizational redefinition of roles within an engineering department - based on established behavioral science principles coupled with rigorous evaluations and research methods specifically developed for this project. The research findings will advance theoretical development of engineering education and organizational development frameworks, while also providing practical case-study examples of change interventions for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Furthermore, successful porting of organizational science principles to higher education may provide validity evidence that higher education can be compared to other organizations, such as those found in private industry.
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
In 2015, faculty in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Colorado State University teamed up with partners in Mathematics, the Institute for Learning and Teaching, Psychology and School of Education to challenge the status quo in engineering education. Now, in the final year of the grant, our revolutionary approach to teaching is capturing the attention of the engineering community and changing the way students perceive and learn engineering at Colorado State University.
Intellectual Merit: Reimagined learning
With the goal of fostering a more diverse and engaging learning environment to create career-ready engineers, our work has paved the way to a new normal in the ECE department – a collaborative learning environment built on creativity and blurring the lines between courses.
In a traditional engineering program, faculty teach courses in “silos,” and they are not incentivized to look at the curriculum holistically. As a result, students feel like they are learning information in a vacuum and they struggle to see how disparate ideas will help them be a successful engineer.
Through the RED project, ECE professors are breaking down those silos. At a fundamental level, our faculty are working creatively and collaboratively to help students “get it.” Changes have occurred in the integration and delivery of content to show students what real engineering is. Thinking beyond their individual courses, multifaceted faculty teams meet on a weekly basis to synthesize technical content across the curriculum. To illustrate how topics are interconnected and interdependent, they have developed knowledge integration, or KI, activities using familiar high-tech applications to show students how ECE concepts drive innovation, from biomedical imaging tools to self-driving cars to smartphones.
Throughout the project, we collected input from students to refine the KI activities, leading to improved understanding of complex and abstract concepts. Based on students' responses to their preferred learning styles, the KI activities have evolved from asking students to answer a set of questions from faculty to adopting a reverse process of asking students to ask their own questions based on a set of anchoring technical concepts.
“Our professors bring together seemingly unrelated subjects, such as electronics and electromagnetics, to show us how they are applied to a real-world situation,” said Priscilla Vazquez, an electrical engineering graduate student who completed her undergraduate degree during the grant cycle. “I find myself using these ideas to understand the world around me. It’s what I like most about engineering.”
The RED project has led to innovative, collaborative new norms in teaching and learning, and our research shows that students performed better as a result.
Broader Impacts: Career-ready engineers
Statistics show that a staggering number of students across the country leave electrical and computer engineering before graduating, and those who persist through to graduation often find themselves grappling to understand what is means to be an engineer in a rapidly changing world. We are working to change that. Our work to transform teaching and learning will help generate career-ready engineers who have the mastery of ECE fundamentals and are ready to apply that knowledge to real work applications.
Aiming to hook students’ interest in the field and prepare them for success in the profession, our faculty are helping students become well-rounded engineers by weaving central themes throughout the curriculum, called “threads,” to enrich their technical knowledge. As the underpinning of engineering, the creativity thread provides additional opportunities to engage in research and design projects at all levels of the undergraduate program, while the foundations thread is designed to show students why math matters in engineering. Through the professional formation thread, the Engineer in Residence program is helping students hone professional skills, such as communication and teamwork. Hugely popular among students, the novel program is a partnership with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers that brings engineering professionals into the laboratory to advise and mentor undergraduates.
Our pedagogical innovations provide a broader framework for transformative changes in engineering departments to show students why they are learning material and why it matters to the world outside the classroom. Furthermore, our efforts to engage industry to develop students’ professionalism skills could contribute to the body of knowledge on the professional formation of engineers. Validity data show our new scale for measuring students’ attitudes toward learning professionalism skills is useful and accurate.
If our model is adopted across the nation, it is exciting to consider the far-reaching impacts of our work. We envision a new generation of well-rounded engineers equipped to generate better ideas, products, and services. Contributing to our nation’s economic vitality and global competitiveness, they will help create a better world for all.
Last Modified: 07/09/2021
Modified by: Anthony A Maciejewski
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