Affordances and Barriers to Creating Educational Change: A Case Study of an Educational Innovation Implemented into a First-year Engineering Design Course

This evidence-based instructional-practice paper describes a case study of the implementation of an educational innovation into a multi-instructor, multi-section first-year design course in the College of Engineering at Penn State University. Although literature from education and psychology fields provides many examples of how to enhance student learning, adoption rates for evidence-based instructional practices have been fairly low among engineering faculty. Even when teaching and learning centers are able to facilitate the adoption of evidence-based practices, encouraging a large fraction of engineering faculty to make substantial changes in instruction remains very challenging. This paper describes an educational innovation adopted by the engineering design program and the results of a qualitative study focusing on the affordances and barriers that emerged during the change process. The findings show that affordances that supported change were related to flexibility, fit of the instructional methods with the course, meeting a perceived need, ease of use, and financial incentives offered by the college’s teaching and learning center. A sense of community yet autonomy also encouraged faculty to participate. Barriers included implementation ambiguity, time required to implement and to prepare, and a perceived lack of expertise in some of topics involved in the innovation such as ethics. Faculty resistance to change, the logistical concerns of the course, and characteristics of the university, as well as interpersonal dynamics also impacted the likelihood of adoption. The results are discussed in terms of implications for faculty developers and teaching and learning centers. Introduction and Literature Review In the past several decades, engineering education has seen a significant increase in the amount of research and funding dedicated to implementing instructional change to better enhance student learning. Funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation have invested substantial monetary resources into changing engineering education to better meet global and societal challenges. Abundant research has been conducted in the STEM education context supporting the efficacy of instructional practices such as active learning (e.g., Prince, 2003; Freeman et al., 2014). However, research has also shown that many engineering faculty members still teach in a traditional manner (i.e., Bender & Weimer, 2005; Borrego, Froyd, & Hall, 2010; Dancy & Henderson, 2008). In addition, many educational initiatives, funded or unfunded, often fail to be long-lasting or transformative. The paper examines affordances and barriers in a case study of an educational initiative implemented in a first-year design course, in order to identify elements that support instructional change as well as those elements that could be potential barriers to change. Studying this initiative, funded by a teaching and learning center, can provide insight on how various resources can best