Writing Effective Evaluation and Dissemination/Diffusion Plans
- Conference
- Location
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Vancouver, BC
- Publication Date
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June 26, 2011
- Start Date
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June 26, 2011
- End Date
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June 29, 2011
- ISSN
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2153-5965
- Conference Session
- Tagged Topic
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NSF Grantees
- Page Count
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21
- Page Numbers
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22.1715.1 - 22.1715.21
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--18994
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/18994
- Download Count
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477
Paper Authors
Thomas A. Litzinger Pennsylvania State University, University Park
Dr. Thomas A. Litzinger is Director of the Leonhard Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Education and a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Penn State, where he has been on the faculty since 1985. His work in engineering education involves curricular reform, teaching and learning innovations, faculty development, and assessment. He teaches and conducts research in the areas of combustion and thermal sciences. He is an Associate Editor of Advances in Engineering Education and a Fellow of ASEE.
Sarah E. Zappe Pennsylvania State University, University Park
Dr. Sarah Zappe is Director of Assessment and Instructional Support in the Leonhard Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Education at Penn State. She holds a masters and a doctorate in educational psychology, where she specialized in applied testing and measurement. Her current research interests include the use of qualitative information, such as think-alouds, to enhance validity evidence for a test. She is also interested in developing instruments to measure engineering professional skills such as global awareness, communication, and leadership.
Maura J. Borrego Virginia Tech
Maura Borrego is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech. She is currently serving a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship at the National Science Foundation. Her research interests focus on interdisciplinary faculty members and graduate students in engineering and science, with engineering education as a specific case. Dr. Borrego holds U.S. NSF CAREER and Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) awards for her engineering education research. Dr. Borrego has developed and taught graduate level courses in engineering education research methods and assessment from 2005 - 2010. All of Dr. Borrego’s degrees are in Materials Science and Engineering. Her M.S. and Ph.D. are from Stanford University, and her B.S. is from University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Jefferey E. Froyd
Texas A&M University
orcid.org/0000-0002-4426-2681
Jeffrey E. Froyd is the Director of Faculty Climate and Development at Texas A&M University. He served as Project Director for the Foundation Coalition, an NSF Engineering Education Coalition in which six institutions systematically renewed, assessed, and institutionalized their undergraduate engineering curricula, and extensively shared their results with the engineering education community. He co-created the Integrated, First-Year Curriculum in Science, Engineering and Mathematics at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, which was recognized in 1997 with a Hesburgh Award Certificate of Excellence. He has authored or co-authored over 70 papers on engineering education in areas ranging from curricular change to faculty development. He is collaborating on NSF-supported projects for 1.) renewal of the mechanics of materials course, 2.) improving preparation of students for Calculus I, and 3.) systemic application of concept inventories. He is currently an ABET Program Evaluator and a Senior Associate Editor for the Journal on Engineering Education.
Wendy Newstetter Georgia Institute of Technology
Director of Learning Sciences Research in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. Her research focuses on understanding learning in interdisciplines towards designing educational environments that develop integrative problem solving.
Karen L. Tonso Wayne State University
Dr. Karen L. Tonso is an Associate Professor of Social Foundations at Wayne State University. Her expertise encompasses gender studies, peer-group cultures in schools, and qualitative research methods. In cultural studies of engineering education, she brings to bear 15 years of experiences as a reservoir engineer in the petroleum industry. She is the author of "On the Outskirts of Engineering," numerous chapters, and journal articles.
Peggy Noel Van Meter Pennsylvania State University
Dr. Van Meter is an Associate Professor in the Educational Psychology program at Penn State. She teaches courses on the application of psychological theories and models to address questions of classroom learning and problem solving. Dr. Van Meter's primary research interests concern students' ability to learn from and use nonverbal representations such as diagrams, graphs, and formulas. She has collaborated with a team of engineering faculty at Penn State on an NSF-funded project studying engineering students' understanding of mechanical engineering concepts in statics and their ability to model engineering problems. Dr. Van Meter has published her research in educational research journals and is on the editorial boards of several leading journals in this field.
Abstract
Writing effective evaluation and dissemination/diffusion plans This paper will summarize the output from an NSF‐sponsored workshop on writing evaluation and dissemination plans for research on innovations in engineering education. The overarching goal of the workshop was to create a document that would assist engineering educators in writing effective plans for their proposals to NSF. Recent program solicitations from the NSF Division of Undergraduate Education, “Transforming Undergraduate Education in the Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (TUES)”, explicitly ask that the leaders of TUES projects move beyond disseminating results to engage other educators in adopting the innovations that are developed. Thus, there is a need to design more than dissemination plans. Processes by which innovations are adopted (or adapted) by others studied within a field referred to as ‘diffusion of innovations’. We will adopt this terminology and use the term dissemination/diffusion plan to make clear that more than dissemination is now expected for projects funded by TUES. The workshop was organized by an interdisciplinary team from the learning sciences and engineering education. The workshop participants were similarly interdisciplinary. During the workshop four interdisciplinary teams worked through the process of creating evaluation and disseminations plans for different types of innovations in engineering education. They were asked to summarize the process for creating the plans. After the workshop, the organizing team synthesized the workshop output into a set of guiding questions and major findings. The sets of questions are intended to guide engineering educators through a systematic process of as they begin to construct evaluation and dissemination/diffusion plans. This paper will describe the workshop and present the major findings and the sets of guiding questions that resulted from the synthesis of the output from the workshop. Feedback from workshop participants will also be presented. An appendix to the paper will contain the full workshop report.
Litzinger, T. A., & Zappe, S. E., & Borrego, M. J., & Froyd, J. E., & Newstetter, W., & Tonso, K. L., & Van Meter, P. N. (2011, June), Writing Effective Evaluation and Dissemination/Diffusion Plans Paper presented at 2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Vancouver, BC. 10.18260/1-2--18994
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