Education Practice - Building Capacity in Engineering Education Research

As an emerging profession, there is a central need to increase the community of engineering education scholars. The Building Capacity research area is involved with understanding, designing, and implementing learning experiences to increase the number of engineering education researchers. Research associated with these projects is connected with the Interdisciplinary and Epistemologies research areas.

Past projects:
Institute for Scholarship on Engineering Education (ISEE) – a collaboration primarily with Howard University, Stanford University, and the University of Washington. ISEE is a year long intensive research experience for engineering faculty and graduate students as part of the NSF funded Center for the Advancement for Engineering Education (CAEE). The goals are to (1) cultivate a diverse community of engineering education researchers who can think and work across disciplines with the ultimate aim of making scholarly contributions to engineering education research and impacting the engineering student experience and (2) formulate principles and models for advancing this scholarship community.

Stepping Stones Workshop – a collaboration with Sally Fincher (University of Kent), Mats Daniels (Uppsala University), and Arnold Pears (Uppsala University). Stepping Stones is based on the “Bootstrapping in Computer Science Education” project with a particular focus on developing engineering education within Sweden. In June 2006 faculty and graduate students from Swedish universities began a year long investigation into conceptions of engineering from a Swedish perspective. The workshop cycle will end in June 2007 and will focus on sharing and analyzing the data, as well as dissemination of the research.