Short Term Impact of an Engineering Education Research Workshop on Participant's Research Interests and Capabilities

This paper presents the results of a study that evaluates the impact of a multiday workshop that seeks to build capacity in engineering education research and enable research-informed approaches to transform engineering education. The focus of this paper is on the short-term impacts of the workshop as measured through a pre and post survey. The evaluation plan also includes long-term impacts, but this is not included in this paper. The survey included closed and open-ended questions regarding participants’ familiarity, confidence and engagement in conducting engineering education research and using research to inform teaching or curriculum. An analysis of the pre-survey illustrates the considerable variability in participants’ backgrounds in engineering education research; however, all participants emphasized a need for better understanding of choosing a conceptual framework for education research, using principles of rigor in education research, and developing a plan to answer a research question. The aggregate analysis of pre-post changes indicate gains in the level of familiarity for distinguishing education research from engineering research and the knowledge of principles and methods of rigorous educational research. An increase in the interest of building a community of researchers was also observed. An interesting observation is that the participants with less teaching experience, presumably in the early part of their career, demonstrated relatively more interest towards education research than those who had more experience.