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Today's engineering graduates will solve tomorrow's problems in a world that is advancing faster and facing more critical challenges than ever before. This situation creates significant demand for engineering education to evolve in order to effectively prepare a diverse community of engineers for these challenges. Such concerns have led to the publication of visionary reports that help orient the work of those committed to the success of engineering education. Research in engineering education is central to "all" of these visions. Research on the student experience is fundamental to informing the evolution of engineering education. A broad understanding of the engineering student experience involves thinking about diverse academic pathways, navigation of these pathways, and decision points--how students choose engineering programs, navigate through their programs, and then move on to jobs and careers. Further, looking at students' experiences broadly entails not just thinking about their learning (i.e., skill and knowledge development in both technical and professional areas) but also their motivation, their identification with engineering, their confidence, and their choices after graduation. However, an understanding of the engineering student experience is clearly not enough to create innovation in engineering education. Educators who are capable of using the research on the student experience are needed. This involves not only preparing tomorrow's educators with conceptions of teaching that enable innovation but also understanding how today's educators make teaching decisions. The nation also needs to be concerned about creating the capacity to do such research--in short, more researchers are needed. One promising approach is to work with educators who are interested in engaging in research, supporting them as they negotiate the space between their current activities and their new work in engineering education research. To fully support this process, the nation must also investigate what is required for educators to engage in such a path. The Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE) began research in January 2003 as one of two national higher-education Centers for Teaching and Learning funded by the National Science Foundation that year. Originally funded for 2003-2007, supplementary funds from the Engineering Directorate allowed additional analysis and dissemination to continue through 2010. This report describes the work of CAEE. The authors summarize CAEE's findings and outcomes, followed by highlights from their efforts to disseminate the results, including a set of research instruments and other materials that are available for use by others. The authors conclude with a look ahead at next steps and some questions for future research. Appended are: (1) References and Cumulative Bibliography; (2) Cumulative Team List and Advisory Board Members; (3) APS Headlines; (4) Local Inquiry Questions; (5) Looking Ahead: Ideas for Future Research. (Contains 26 figures and 10 tables.)

Decision making is central to the teaching of engineering, however, little has been written about the teaching of engineering educators. The authors believe that engineering educators can benefit from insights into how to better prepare for teaching decisions since they are faced with teaching-related decisions on a daily basis. The findings from this study illustrate that time can be a valuable lens for showing the complexity of engineering educator decisions. Although participants generally acknowledged time as constraints or limitations, some participants' responses suggested creative solutions to overcome time as a limitation. The authors categorized these creative approaches along three dimensions: (1) Faculty-centered approaches; (2) Student-centered approaches; and (3) Content-centered approaches.

Creating a learner-centered environment within an instructional setting is a goal which engineering faculty are encouraged to achieve. However, there is little research about how engineering educators actually incorporate learner issues into their teaching. This paper describes how three engineering educators talked about learners in the context of talking about teaching decisions.

Even though diversity issues have not always been addressed in engineering education, addressing diversity has emerged as an important issue in the engineering education community as the student population in colleges and universities has become increasingly more diverse. Despite these changes in student populations, attrition from engineering programs remains a significant issue across all groups. For underrepresented minority groups, recruitment and retention in the engineering programs is especially critical because significantly fewer engineering degrees were awarded to these students in the last decade. The current number of minorities and women in student populations represented in engineering programs are still well below parity with their distribution within the higher education population. The context of this diversity research was situated within a larger qualitative study of future engineering faculty at a large, public research university on the West Coast. These future engineering educators created teaching portfolios during an 8 session workshop in which they had the opportunity to examine, reflect, and revise their beliefs and goals as teachers through a series of exercises, writing tasks, and group discussions. In the first of two workshop sessions about diversity, graduate students and post-docs were asked to write a diversity statement after a facilitated discussion about diversity issues in engineering education. In the subsequent session, they shared these written statements and discussed them with other workshop participants in a peer review activity. After the conclusion of this workshop, participants underwent semi-structured interviews for an hour about the processes that they used in constructing their teaching portfolios and the outcomes and impacts that creating a teaching portfolio had on them. In this study, the authors focus the analysis on the exit interview data. The core of this analysis was to characterize how these study participants thought about diversity as it relates to engineering education and where and how they formed their ideas. The data suggest that most participants had thought about diversity issues and had formed opinions or strategies for addressing diversity in engineering education. Some participants shared narratives in which they described critical incidents that shaped their attitudes, beliefs, and conceptions of diversity through these personal experiences. All participants were cognizant that diversity issues can be highly sensitive and chose their words carefully when discussing diversity issues.

It is considered good practice to teach with an awareness that groups of students will not be homogeneous, and will differ. Research tells educators to take into account specific student differences, including learning styles, socio-economic status, race, and culture. This important issue has been debated and discussed; however, little has been written about how engineering educators examine, consider, and use student differences in their teaching practice. This paper addresses the extent to which, and the ways in which, engineering educators take student differences into account when making teaching-related decisions. The results suggest that engineering educators are taking student differences into account, but that the differences to which educators attend may not be aligned with the differences that research suggests educators should address. Implications are offered for faculty developers or others interested in helping educators more effectively take student differences into account.

Decision making is central to the teaching of engineering, however, little has been written about the teaching decisions of engineering educators. By exploring the processes through which engineering educators make teaching decisions and the factors they consider, the authors can use decision making as a means to understand their teaching practices and gain a better understanding of how to help engineering educators make more effective decisions about their teaching. The results of this study will be useful to practicing engineering educators because it describes specific ways in which current faculty address preparing their students for engineering practice.

For many engineering educators, the often controversial topic of diversity can be frustrating and difficult. Even for those who acknowledge that diversity is an important issue for the engineering education community, translating understanding into tangible actions that support diverse students can be problematic. This paper provides results from a program using written diversity statements to encourage thinking and dialogue about the topic of diversity among graduate students interested in a faculty career. Analysis of the discourse surrounding the diversity statements suggests that there is reason to be encouraged about the usefulness of such an exercise in enabling participants to engage with diversity issues in engineering education. The data reflect a conversation with a continuous interplay of three topics (diversity, teaching, and task), and concerns about the purpose of the diversity statement were restricted to the early part of the conversation. All participants were involved in the conversation and had similar overall contributions that continued throughout session 7 and included all three primary themes (diversity, teaching, and task). The conversation covered a variety of challenges associated with thinking about diversity and teaching, but also included concrete strategies for integrating diversity issues into teaching, including both in-class actions and outside of class activities. Analysis of the data also indicates that the participants were capable of discussing, writing, and thinking about diversity in engineering education. Participants' perspectives on teaching went well beyond traditional lecturing, and they had sufficient awareness of diversity issues to begin and sustain the conversation. Participants engaged in this complex discourse without any external authority figures managing the discussion or providing additional information. The authors conclude that the graduate students in this study were prepared to discuss issues of diversity and teaching on engineering.

Understanding and promoting effective teaching are central concerns of the engineering education community. This paper reports on research to investigate the processes by which construction of teaching portfolios in a socially supportive context can promote the advancement of teaching knowledge and ability. By characterizing how a specific intervention can advance teaching knowledge and effectiveness, findings and ideas are generated that can help others engaged in the same goal. This study looked at the CAEE Engineering Teaching Portfolio Program (ETPP) as a learning event--how the individual and social processes associated with building a teaching portfolio could lead to advancement of teaching knowledge and ability. Participants in the ETPP prepared a teaching portfolio consisting of a teaching philosophy, two to five annotated artifacts, and a diversity statement. Peer review--defined as reciprocal evaluation of written products--was originally conceived as a core element of the program and makes up about half of each ETPP session. Evidence suggests that the peer review periods may be important from the perspective of both learning and other participant outcomes. This and other indicators identified the peer review activities as one of the most important elements of the ETPP. Developing a greater understanding of what is going on during these periods provides insights to programs that create approaches to improve teaching.

Engineering education can be thought of as a complex design activity where educators create a range of teaching artifacts including course curricula, classroom policies, lecture notes, exams, and timelines for student group projects. In order to design such artifacts, engineering faculty must make a series of teaching decisions, each of which can impact their students' learning and engagement with course activities. Given the importance of decision-making in engineering education, the authors hope that by beginning to characterize engineering educator decisions, educators will gain a greater awareness of their decision-making by recognizing, characterizing, and anticipating decision points. Thus, the initial research questions driving this study were: (1) What aspects of engineering educators' decision-making processes are prominent during their participation in the instructional development process?; and (2) How can engineering educators make more effective decisions? This exploratory study looks at engineering faculty decisions as expressed during the instructional development process.