Alexandra Strong
Cornell University, NY·Education Research
Changing how engineering is taught usually comes with a price tag. Most research on reforming engineering courses has studied big, well-funded efforts backed by administrators, which leaves out the hundreds of departments that do not have that money or support.
- Fields
Education Research
Engineering
Social Science
- Topics
engineering education
curricular transformation
pedagogical change
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Oct 2028
What they work on
- Survey engineering educators to identify the characteristics that distinguish and unify faculty who pursue curricular transformation, establishing a foundation for recruiting cases of change achieved under limited resources.
- Build in-depth change narratives from 12-15 engineering educators who transformed courses despite barriers that stalled change elsewhere, using interviews, course observations and curricular-change documents analyzed with narrative analysis.
- Convene a collaborative inquiry group of 8-12 engineering educators to validate the change stories against their own practice and co-design workshops, activities and resources they will lead in their own departments and disciplines.
- Develop a professional learning framework for courses and workshops on educational change, grounded in theories of professional agency, and support educator-led dissemination of the change stories through multiple media.
More about the research
Meanwhile, instructors in those under-resourced settings are quietly redesigning their own courses anyway, and their strategies are rarely documented or shared. This project collects and amplifies those stories to understand what individual instructors actually do to overcome what the project calls pedagogical inertia, the tendency of courses to keep being taught the way they always have been.
Why it matters
Engineering departments without large budgets or dedicated teaching centers currently have few models for updating their courses. By documenting how instructors in those settings have succeeded and turning their strategies into workshops and resources they themselves deliver, this work could give faculty, graduate student developers, and administrators practical, affordable approaches to course and curricular change, and give funders better evidence about which supports matter.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
David Raymond
California State University-Los Angeles, CA·Education Research
Redesign sophomore engineering gateway courses around mastery-based grading, where students get multiple penalty-free attempts, to improve completion and transfer rates at three Hispanic-serving institutions.
Andrea Beach
Western Michigan University, MI·Education Research
Synthesize research published from 2010 to 2021 on instructional interventions in undergraduate STEM and social science courses, using a framework synthesis approach to identify themes and advances in instructional change.
Mindy Reynolds
Washington College, MD·Education Research
Establish FAMNet, a structured co-mentoring network that pairs faculty experienced in evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs) with faculty mentees across two-year and four-year colleges.
The school
Cornell University: 37 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 537 research doctorates a year.
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