Pilot Study and Survey to Increase Adoption and Sustained Utilization of Simulations Using Role-Play Course Content

Role-playing (RP) has been used in psychology, medicine, and education because of the rich learning experiences it provide to students and the dialog that they open between faculty and student. Despite these benefits, it has not been widely adopted. A pilot study generating classroom STEM RP simulations to meet course learning objectives was also conducted to gain deeper insight into the barriers to both adoption and sustained utilization of RP course content from several areas of engineering problem solving. Eleven engineering faculty at an undergraduate-focused engineering college were interviewed about adoption of RP for the most challenging course objectives. Six of the eleven were willing to consider RP simulations. RP content was designed for those six and deployed for classroom use. Using an RBIS barriers to adoption survey as a template, a survey was created and distributed to 125 faculty members in engineering to determine if the barriers to adoption were the same for RP and RBIS or if RP had unique barriers.