Background Despite decades of effort focused on improvement of engineering education, many recent advances have not resulted in systemic change. Diffusion of innovations theory is used to better understand this phenomenon. Purpose (Hypothesis) Research questions include: How widespread is awareness and adoption of established engineering education innovations? Are there differences by discipline or institutional type? How do engineering department chairs find out about engineering education innovations? What factors do engineering department chairs cite as important in adoption decisions? Design/Method U.S. engineering department chairs were surveyed regarding their awareness and department use of seven engineering education innovations. One hundred ninety‐seven usable responses are presented primarily as categorical data with Chi square tests where relevant. Results Overall, the awareness rate was 82 percent, while the adoption rate was 47 percent. Eighty‐two percent of engineering departments employ student‐active pedagogies (the highest). Mechanical and civil engineering had the highest rates, in part due to many design‐related innovations in the survey. Few differences by institution type were evident. In the past, word of mouth and presentations were far more effective than publications in alerting department chairs to the innovations. Department chairs cited financial resources, faculty time and attitudes, and student satisfaction and learning as major considerations in adoption decisions. Conclusions The importance of disciplinary networks was evident during survey administration and in the results. Specific recommendations are offered to employ these networks and the engineering professional societies for future engineering education improvement efforts.

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Background In fields such as medicine, psychology, and education, systematic reviews of the literature critically appraise and summarize research to inform policy and practice. We argue that now is an appropriate time in the development of the field of engineering education to both support systematic reviews and benefit from them. More reviews of prior work conducted more systematically would help advance the field by lowering the barrier for both researchers and practitioners to access the literature, enabling more objective critique of past efforts, identifying gaps, and proposing new directions for research.Purpose The purpose of this article is to introduce the methodology of systematic reviews to the field of engineering education and to adapt existing resources on systematic reviews to engineering education and other developing interdisciplinary fields. Scope/MethodThis article is primarily a narrative review of the literature on conducting systematic reviews. Methods are adapted to engineering education and similar developing interdisciplinary fields. To offer concrete, pertinent examples, we also conducted a systematic review of systematic review articles published on engineering education topics since 1990. Fourteen exemplars are presented in this article and used to illustrate systematic review procedures.Conclusions Systematic reviews can benefit the field of engineering education by synthesizing prior work, by better informing practice, and by identifying important new directions for research. Engineering education researchers should consider including systematic reviews in their repertoire of methodologies.

Increasing emphasis on interdisciplinary research and education requires researchers and learners to build links between distinct disciplines. In engineering education, work on integrated curricula to help learners build connections between topics began with three programs in 1988. Integrated curricula have connections to a larger movement in higher education—learning communities, which help learners to build interdisciplinary links and social links within a community. Integrated engineering curricula have provided concrete assessment data on retention and student performance to augment research on learning communities. While innovators in both movements have offered many prototypes and gathered many data, goals and results from programs implemented to date are not sufficiently well defined to guide the design and implementation of programs at other institutions. This paper discusses the importance of integration, reviews accomplishments to date, draws conclusions by analyzing those accomplishments, and suggests future initiatives.

With the rapid increase in the number of scholarly publications on STEM education in recent years, reviews of the status and trends in STEM education research internationally support the development of the field. For this review, we conducted a systematic analysis of 798 articles in STEM education published between 2000 and the end of 2018 in 36 journals to get an overview about developments in STEM education scholarship. We examined those selected journal publications both quantitatively and qualitatively, including the number of articles published, journals in which the articles were published, authorship nationality, and research topic and methods over the years. The results show that research in STEM education is increasing in importance internationally and that the identity of STEM education journals is becoming clearer over time.

Background Increasing attention is being paid to improvement in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education through increased adoption of research-based instructional strategies (RBIS), but high-quality measures of faculty instructional practice do not exist to monitor progress.Purpose/Hypothesis The measure of how well an implemented intervention follows the original is called fidelity of implementation. This theory was used to address the research questions: What is the fidelity of implementation of selected RBIS in engineering science courses? That is, how closely does engineering science classroom practice reflect the intentions of the original developers? Do the critical components that characterize an RBIS discriminate between engineering science faculty members who claimed use of the RBIS and those who did not?Design/Method A survey of 387 U.S. faculty teaching engineering science courses (e.g., statics, circuits, thermodynamics) included questions about class time spent on 16 critical components and use of 11 corresponding RBIS. Fidelity was quantified as the percentage of RBIS users who also spent time on corresponding critical components. Discrimination between users and nonusers was tested using chi square.Results Overall fidelity of the 11 RBIS ranged from 11% to 80% of users spending time on all required components. Fidelity was highest for RBIS with one required component: casebased teaching, just-in-time teaching, and inquiry learning. Thirteen of 16 critical components discriminated between users and nonusers for all RBIS to which they were mapped.Conclusions Results were consistent with initial mapping of critical components to RBIS. Fidelity of implementation is a potentially useful framework for future work in STEM undergraduate education.

Many research-based instruction strategies (RBISs) have been developed; their superior efficacy with respect to student learning has been demonstrated in many studies. Collecting and interpreting evidence about: 1) the extent to which electrical and computer engineering (ECE) faculty members are using RBISs in core, required engineering science courses, and 2) concerns that they express about using them, are important aspects of understanding how engineering education is evolving. The authors surveyed ECE faculty members, asking about their awareness and use of selected RBISs. The survey also asked what concerns ECE faculty members had about using RBISs. Respondent data showed that awareness of RBISs was very high, but estimates of use of RBISs, based on survey data, varied from 10% to 70%, depending on characteristics of the strategy. The most significant concern was the amount of class time that using an RBIS might take; efforts to increase use of RBISs must address this.Index Terms-Change in engineering education, diffusion of innovations, faculty adoption, faculty awareness, research-based instructional strategies (RBISs), teaching.

This paper examines one aspect of the curricular change process undertaken by the Foundation Coalition (FC); specifically, how understanding about curricular change held by the FC leaders evolved as they moved through the process of establishing a new curriculum at their institutions. The initial change model was similar to that used for product development and emphasized the role of a pilot program. However, as the curriculum moved beyond the pilot stage to adoption and full‐scale implementation, and then into the final stage where sustaining the new curriculum was the focus, the change model became more complex. Those complexities reflect a parallel evolution in their understanding of what constitutes a curriculum, from their initial conceptualization of it as a product to be carefully designed towards an understanding of it as a dynamic entity whose growth must be sustained.