Please read before using the Guiding Questions
Developing evaluation and dissemination/diffusion[1] plans is an iterative process.
The order in which the guiding questions are presented should not be interpreted to represent a rigid process, but rather as guides to help you along the pathway to creating effective plans. The process will require both jumping ahead to later questions and looping back to earlier questions. We recommend that you overview all questions prior to beginning your work.
Evaluation and dissemination/diffusion plans should be explicitly linked together.
As groups did their work during the workshop, it also became quite clear that intent to persuade others to adopt/adapt an innovation requires that evaluation plans include the collection of persuasive evidence. Accordingly, evaluation plans and dissemination/diffusion plans are intimately linked. Writing high quality evaluation and dissemination/diffusion plans will involve bridging from one plan to the other and back again.
Synergies among the learning scientists[2] and engineering educators can be powerful.
The workshop reinforced important synergies and benefits of bringing together engineering educators and learning scientists. A consistent finding across working groups was that the interaction of members from an interdisciplinary team made significant, positive contributions throughout the process. We, therefore, strongly encourage all engineering educators who decide to use our guiding questions to seek a partner with expertise in learning and measurement as early as possible in the process of creating the evaluation plans.
The team writing the plans, and the proposal, should include at least one learning scientist.
A team with a complementary set of experiences, expertise and training will assure an optimal evaluation strategy for the proposed project. The team should be assembled as early as possible in the planning of the project to ensure that the evaluation strategies best match the planned work, and also so that the planned work is guided by contemporary learning theories.
Interdisciplinary teams must be mindful of the potential for miscommunication.
The experience at the workshop made clear that differing backgrounds and vocabularies used by the various team members may lead to communication issues. For example, the engineering community has come to use terms like outcome and objective, as a result of ABET, in ways that are different from their use in the fields related to learning. Be sensitive to these differences and try to avoid wasting time arguing over semantics. The specific terms used are far less important than the meaning behind them.
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[1]Processes by which innovations are adopted and adapted by others are studied under an umbrella field often referred to as ‘diffusion of innovations’. We adopt this terminology in this report and use the term dissemination/diffusion plan to make clear that more than dissemination is now expected. Please the Introduction for additional discussion of this point.
[2] “Learning scientists are dedicated to the interdisciplinary empirical investigation of learning as it exists in real-world settings and how learning may be facilitated both with and without technology.” The field encompasses many disciplines including cognitive science, educational psychology, education, and sociology. Reference: Website of the International Society of Learning Scientists (www.isls.org)
The order in which the guiding questions are presented should not be interpreted to represent a rigid process, but rather as guides to help you along the pathway to creating effective plans. The process will require both jumping ahead to later questions and looping back to earlier questions. We recommend that you overview all questions prior to beginning your work.
Evaluation and dissemination/diffusion plans should be explicitly linked together.
As groups did their work during the workshop, it also became quite clear that intent to persuade others to adopt/adapt an innovation requires that evaluation plans include the collection of persuasive evidence. Accordingly, evaluation plans and dissemination/diffusion plans are intimately linked. Writing high quality evaluation and dissemination/diffusion plans will involve bridging from one plan to the other and back again.
Synergies among the learning scientists[2] and engineering educators can be powerful.
The workshop reinforced important synergies and benefits of bringing together engineering educators and learning scientists. A consistent finding across working groups was that the interaction of members from an interdisciplinary team made significant, positive contributions throughout the process. We, therefore, strongly encourage all engineering educators who decide to use our guiding questions to seek a partner with expertise in learning and measurement as early as possible in the process of creating the evaluation plans.
The team writing the plans, and the proposal, should include at least one learning scientist.
A team with a complementary set of experiences, expertise and training will assure an optimal evaluation strategy for the proposed project. The team should be assembled as early as possible in the planning of the project to ensure that the evaluation strategies best match the planned work, and also so that the planned work is guided by contemporary learning theories.
Interdisciplinary teams must be mindful of the potential for miscommunication.
The experience at the workshop made clear that differing backgrounds and vocabularies used by the various team members may lead to communication issues. For example, the engineering community has come to use terms like outcome and objective, as a result of ABET, in ways that are different from their use in the fields related to learning. Be sensitive to these differences and try to avoid wasting time arguing over semantics. The specific terms used are far less important than the meaning behind them.
__________________________________________________________
[1]Processes by which innovations are adopted and adapted by others are studied under an umbrella field often referred to as ‘diffusion of innovations’. We adopt this terminology in this report and use the term dissemination/diffusion plan to make clear that more than dissemination is now expected. Please the Introduction for additional discussion of this point.
[2] “Learning scientists are dedicated to the interdisciplinary empirical investigation of learning as it exists in real-world settings and how learning may be facilitated both with and without technology.” The field encompasses many disciplines including cognitive science, educational psychology, education, and sociology. Reference: Website of the International Society of Learning Scientists (www.isls.org)