Building And Assessing Capacity In Engineering Education Research: The Bootstrapping Model

Improvements in engineering education will depend to a great extent on the availability of sound engineering education research. But how does a researcher, trained in engineering, begin to carry out education research, relying as it does upon non-engineering methodologies “borrowed” from the learning sciences? In response to these concerns, there have recently been initiatives in developing educational research expertise among engineering educators. In this paper we describe a multi-institutional, multi-national model (which we call Bootstrapping) designed to support education practitioners in Computer Science in undertaking high quality educational research. The Bootstrapping model comprises a set of integrated activities focused on specific acts of collaborative research called experiment kits. An experiment kit is embedded in a oneweek workshop, in which particpants learn and practice appropriate research methods. Participants gather data over the course of a year and twelve months later, join a second oneweek workshop where they share results, analyze data, plan for reporting and dissemination, and design additional studies. We have run two of these projects in the United State, funded by the National Science Foundation. We also discuss measures by which we might gauge the success of these capacity-building endeavors, anchored in Wenger’s concept of communities of practice. Using participant responses to email questionnaires, we apply these measures to the two instantiations of the Bootstrapping model. This qualitative analysis indicates a dense network of continuing research collaborations, and provides strong evidence for the “shared histories of learning” that characterize communities of practice which extend over time.