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Hidden barriers to academic staff engaging in Engineering Education Research
Abstract
At Swinburne University of Technology, the Faculty of Engineering and Industrial Sciences (FEIS) has charged the Engineering and Science Education Research (ESER) group with facilitating change to increase the level of engineering education research within FEIS. This paper reports on the first of a two-stage project, with the research question: How can the barriers to academic staff undertaking engineering education research be usefully conceived and framed to assist academics (and those supporting them) to overcome those barriers? Data was collected using critical reflection and dialogue in reference to the literature. Our findings suggest that barriers can at times be tacit, murky and unnamed-effectively hidden. This paper argues that to support staff to engage in education research and scholarship there is a need to understand and address not only institutional barriers, but also underlying, hidden barriers. This paper proposes an approach to such barriers and describes future research.
... Even with this research evidence however, many academics still use traditional teaching approaches, and seem to dismiss the evidence-based research supporting the use of active learning approaches. There are many reasons for this academic resistance; some are based around institutional barriers (such as lack of time, perceived lack of importance of good teaching in determining promotion), but some are based on more subtle academic perceptions (Mann, Chang, & Mazzolini, 2011)� To investigate this issue, the authors posed the following research question: Why do academics teaching physics resist moving toward a more active learning approach? ...
... There are many reasons for this academic inertia even within the context of considerable PER evidence showing that traditional transmissive instruction is ineffective. The contributions to academic inertia are many and varied (Gibbs, 1981;Mann et al., 2011) and include: ...
There is ample evidence that students have many misconceptions in physics, which are difficult to correct using traditional teaching methods. Even with this evidence however, many academics still use traditional teaching approaches, and seem to dismiss the evidence-based research supporting the use of active learning approaches. The research question posed in the study reported was "Why do academics teaching physics resist moving toward active learning approaches?" A meta-interpretation method was used to analyse and synthesise multiple previous studies on student learning, student misconceptions and academic teaching. The results indicated that a major factor affecting academic resistance to moving toward active learning approaches is that academics themselves have misconceptions about how effective traditional approaches are in helping students learn. The implication from this is that the same strategies for overcoming student misconceptions in physics can also be applied to overcoming academic misconceptions. The paper reports on the design of a professional development program at Swinburne University that has been initiated to address these academic misconceptions.
Currently there is limited understanding about the academic qualifications (or formal research training) which engineering education researchers possess, and which university departments they primarily reside in. The objective of this study is to capture information on these researcher characteristics via bibliographic analysis of publicly available sources. A list of 104 authors affiliated with Australian institutions who published in at least one of thirteen engineering education journals between 2018-2019 (inclusive) was retrieved. For each author, information about their qualifications and where they worked was compiled from available biographic information in their publications (e.g. often common in IEEE publications), ORCID profile, Scopus profile, the Australian TROVE database, and online university researcher profile. In total, 80 authors held a known PhD; 30 in technical engineering, 12 in engineering education, 3 in education, 21 in other disciplines, and 14 not specified. Of the 67 with known bachelor degrees, 69% were in engineering, the remainder widely varied. 92 authors worked in a university; 56 in engineering faculty, 9 in computing faculty, 13 in other faculty, 9 in teaching and learning departments, 4 in other capacities at a university. 4 authors did not work at a university. Our findings show that while a minority of engineering education researchers hold technical engineering PhD degrees, PhD theses on engineering education topics are becoming more widespread and we can predict a growing community of Australian engineering researchers. These data can assist with planning strategies for further increasing engagement with engineering education research in the Australian context.
A working group was established at AUT University in 2005 with a brief to identify initiatives that might be taken to promote and support staff engagement in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). The working group recognized that a ‘stock‐taking’ exercise would need to be undertaken before appropriate initiatives could be identified, trialled and evaluated. In this article the methodology and specific methods used for the stock‐take, which included bench‐marking with other New Zealand universities, are outlined and key findings are presented and discussed. These findings provide a helpful snapshot of the presence of SoTL within New Zealand universities and within the everyday lives of New Zealand university teachers. They highlight the complexity of those lives and tertiary institution environments that can make it challenging for teachers to become more scholarly and to engage in SoTL. They also point to ways in which those environments may be made more conducive to the realization of these goals. In this article, the methodology and specific methods used for the stock‐take, which included bench‐marking with other New Zealand universities, are outlined and key findings are presented and discussed.