Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Página 181 de 957
Discussion
These results demonstrate that U.S. engineering education innovators and researchers
have a wide range of NSF funding opportunities available to them, from large centers to
small seed grants to initiate new projects. Other federal agencies, such as NASA and the
Department of Defense, also fund engineering-related education interventions, but NSF
views its unique role as providing the research base and initial translation to practice for
cutting-edge STEM education.
These results focus on long-term trends because many values fluctuate from year to year.
Specific funding initiatives which strongly influenced annual totals and trends over time
include the engineering education coalitions, large research and education centers,
nanotechnology and the 2009 economic stimulus package.
The two primary engineering education programs (EEC and CCLI-TUES) focus on the
undergraduate level, CCLI-TUES by virtue of its location in the Division of Undergraduate
Education. Similarly, IMD-DR K-12 focuses on K-12 and was originally part of the Division
on Elementary, Secondary and Informal Education. That division was merged in 2005 with
ROLE-REESE’s home to form the Division for Research on Learning in Formal and Informal
Settings (DRL). This merger strengthens the connections between K-12 science and math
researchers and learning scientists, but may also serve as a disadvantage to engineering
education scholars who work in a newer field that is less engaged with learning sciences
and more focused on implications for practice. Program officers estimate that the success
rate for engineering REESE proposals is lower than the overall rate but increasing.
While the EHR programs have remained relatively stable since 1990 (noting name
changes to reflect shifts in focus), ENG programs (in EEC) have changed every few years. A
strong relationship between educational research and teaching practice was evident since
Combined Research and Curriculum Development program (1996-2000), but the language
has been refined through solicitations for Department-Level Reform (2002-2005),
Innovations in Engineering Education, Curriculum and Infrastructure (2008-2010) and
Research Initiation Grants in Engineering Education and Engineering Education Research
(2011-ongoing). The current program description for Engineering Education Research
clearly articulates expectations for research and its potential impacts on practice:
An ideal engineering education research project addresses the iterative cycle in
which research questions that advance understanding are informed by practice
and the results of research are, in turn, translated into practice. In discussing how
the planned work advances understanding, competitive proposals will ground the
proposed work both in a theoretical framework and relevant prior work, describe
how the research advances knowledge of how engineering students learn, and
discuss how the research results are broadly generalizable and transferable. In
discussing how research can be translated to practice, competitive proposals take
the point of view of a potential user of the educational innovation, describing how
the research results can affect the practice or process of educating engineers,
improve the infrastructure for engineering education, or build networks and
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011