Diffusion of Engineering Education Innovations

Diffusion of Engineering Education Innovations: A Survey of Awareness and Adoption Rates in US Engineering Departments. Maura Borrego, Jeffrey E. Froyd and T. Simin Hall. Journal of Engineering Education July 2010 Vol 99 No. 3

This paper is looking at 7 different 'new' ideas in engineering education and surveys Department Chairs in the US to see if they have heard of them and whether they had tried them. Several random snippets have caught my attention:

What are the new ideas -

1. Student Active Pedagogies - which means having the students do anything in class other than listen to lectures
2. Engineering Learning Communities and Integrated Curricula - Can't really understand what these are but could be Facebook/VLE jobs
3. Artifact Dissection - take the lawnmower apart
4. Summer Bridge Programme - these are pre-university courses
5. Design projects in First Year courses
6. Curriculum based Engineering Service -Learning Projects - I've had a brush with service based learning in Trinidad and it means integrating learning with voluntary community activity.
7. Interdisciplinary Capstone projects

For me at least three of these (1,3 & 7) are quite old ideas

The paper is very solid methodologically and a good example of whats needed for publication. The survey was done using a web survey and got 197 (12 percent) usuable response which is considered to be a reasonable response rate for this type of method.

The overall results are not very interesting there was an average awareness of 82% and an adoption rate of 47% but although the statistics looks robust you have to query how appropriate it is to aggegate these types of response. for example student active pedagogies had a high adoption but could cover a much wider range of possibilities than artifact dissection which works in mech eng as a simple lab but is a lot less useful in other disciplines.

Table 12 is very interesting it has a ranking of the more innovative engineering departments chosen by the respondents:
Rose-Hulman IoT
Purdue
MIT
Carnegie Mellon
Georgia IoT
Franklin W Olin College
Stanford
Harvey Mudd College
North Carolina State
U of Washington
Michigan State
Rowan U
Virginia Tech
Penn State U
UoC Berkeley
Bucknell U
Wocester Polytechnic Institute
Military Academies

Good target list of collaborators.