Stepping Stones: Capacity building in engineering education

CeTUSS (www.CeTUSS.se) is an engineering education center established by the Swedish Council for Renewal of Higher Education in 2004. During 2006/2007 CeTUSS funded "Stepping Stones", a multi-phase (project based) initiative for tertiary engineering educators at Swedish Universities. The aim was to build a community of engineering educators and to increase their familiarity with evaluation and research approaches to assessing the impact of classroom interventions. Stepping Stones was based on the earlier US, UK and Australian initiatives; the scaffolding, bootstrapping and BRACE programmes. The approach uses a joint, multi-method, research study to raise awareness of relevant theory, while simultaneously supporting community development. Community building is achieved through joint work and shared experiences which promote convergence on a common set of values and ideals in relation to scholarship of teaching and learning. Investigative "capacity" was enhanced by drawing together a Swedish pool of engineering education expertise. Stepping Stones consisted of three phases. The first phase was a week long workshop examining relevant theory and empirical study design in engineering education research. This workshop introduced an "experiment kit", a protocol detailing experimental design of the project that participants jointly implemented in phase two. During phase two the participants gathered data in their own classrooms, contributing to a joint corpus of material for analysis in phase three. During the data collection process participants administered and validated a variety of instruments; surveys and interviews (including photo elicitation), and concept map collection using explanograms (a tool for automating collection of handwritten data developed by the CeTUSS center). The final phase was a w.eek-long workshop where participants analyzed the aggregated data and produced a written report, 'What is the Word for "Engineering" in Swedish: Swedish Students Conceptions of their Discipline' (http://www.it.uu.se/research/publications/reports/2007-018).