Applying Engineering and Education Research to Develop Instructional Tools

This talk will highlight different ways research in engineering and education can be employed to support instruction, particularly for engineering in higher education contexts. The talk will be grounded in multiple themes. Using her past work as an engineering education researcher, Dr. Jutshi Agarwal will describe how traditional engineering methods such as optimization using heuristics can be employed to support instructors in problems like forming teams in a large classroom. A discussion on other aspects of using teams in classrooms will follow. The talk will then move to a discussion on the preparation of engineering educators where findings from a mixed-methods study on graduate student teaching self-efficacy will be used to identify lessons learnt for TA-training or preparing future faculty programs. Weaving through these themes, the implications for intentional use of tools and instruments from engineering and education in engineering will be discussed. A case is made for the need for ebbing boundaries between engineering education research and its parent disciplines (education and engineering) or its sister disciplines (biology education, STEM education and other DBER).

Dr. Jutshi Agarwal is a Research Scientist with the Department of Engineering Education at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She received her bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from SRM University, India. She has a master’s in aerospace engineering from the University of Cincinnati, where she was also the first student to graduate from the Ph.D. program in Engineering & Computing Education. Her research is focused on the teaching preparation of graduate students as future engineering faculty, agency of students in open-ended problems, teamwork in classrooms, and the professional development of K-12 teachers for teaching engineering design. She has expertise in conducting quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods education research. Dr. Agarwal strives to identify, adopt, or adapt knowledge from different discipline-based education research (DBER) literature to promote better preparedness and efficacy of educators in engineering at different levels.