Studying the Fidelity of Implementation of an Intrinsic Motivation Course Conversion

The low-cost intrinsic motivation (IM) course conversion project is an effort to improve the quality of undergraduate engineering education by creating course designs that promote students’ intrinsic motivation to learn while keeping the time and financial investments for those course designs low. Because of the project’s explicit goal of creating a course design method that facilitates translation of practices across instructors and courses, a critical test of the method is the fidelity of implementation and outcomes across instructors. In prior papers, we have presented how the first IM-converted course promoted students’ intrinsic motivation to learn and improved their conceptual understanding of the course content. In this paper, we present a replication study that explores and contrasts the implementation and outcomes of the second offering of the IM-converted course when it was taught by different instructors. We use a mixedmethods comparative case study to describe and contrast the two offerings of the course. We present a portion of these case study analyses, contrasting the data and results from course syllabi, student interviews, and course climate surveys.