Studies of change in colleges and universities often consider faculty support a key influence on the success of academic reform efforts. Scholars, however, have given relatively little attention to the role of disciplinary environments (e.g., culture, values, and habits of mind) on educational innovation and change. Using data from 1,272 faculty members in 203 engineering programs on 39 campuses, this study examined whether engineering faculty from different academic environments (defined by Holland's typology) vary in their responses to changing curricular and pedagogical requirements. Findings suggest that the broad disciplinary groupings often used in higher education research fail to capture the subtleties of within-field variations in faculty values, customs, and dispositions relating to curricular and pedagogical change and provide moderate support for using Holland's theory for studying organizational change.Keywords Academic environments Á Disciplinary differences Á Holland typology Á Engineering faculty Á Faculty culture Studies of change in colleges and universities often consider faculty responses to change or innovation a key influence on the success, or lack of a success, of an educational change effort. Faculty buy-in, scholars suggest, is required if change efforts are to succeed. Closely-held professional values such as autonomy in teaching and research and collegial and collaborative decision-making processes must be respected and accommodated if faculty
She conducts research on college student outcomes and university teaching, particularly focused on student epistemology, non-traditional pedagogies, and multicultural education. She also collaborates with engineering colleagues to research educational practices in engineering education. She is currently a Co-PI on the NSF funded Prototyping the Engineer of 2020: A 360-degree Study of Effective Education grant.
Over the past decade, continuous quality improvement (CQI) has emerged as a strategy for documenting and systematically building academic program quality. This study used a nationally representative sample of engineering faculty members and students to examine the influence of faculty members' CQI activities on the relationships between student and institutional characteristics, student experiences in-and out-of-class, and student learning outcomes. A cluster analysis validated the use of four CQI-related variables to differentiate engineering programs into high-and low-CQI groups. In a multiple group path analysis, the models for the high and low groups differed significantly, supporting the hypothesis that CQI indirectly influences the relationships between student and institutional characteristics, student experiences, and student learning outcomes. Further, the path results suggested a number of modifications to the analytical and conceptual frameworks used in the study.
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