The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Engineering
Phillip C. Wankat, Richard M. Felder, Karl A. Smith, Frank S. Oreovicz
Abstract
Engineering education has had a rich tradition of educational innovation, but until the 1980s, assessment of innovation was typically of the "the authors tried it and liked it and so did the students" variety. This situation began to change in the 1980s, when substantial support for scholarship in engineering education became available through the NSF Division of Undergraduate Education and the NSF-sponsored Engineering Education Coalitions program. A large part of the challenge of legitimizing the scholarship of teaching in engineering education involves overcoming this skepticism. The qualitative research methods used widely in the social sciences are gradually percolating into the engineering education literature, although few engineering professors are familiar with them. Although the scholarship of teaching and learning is starting to have an impact on engineering education, formidable barriers to its acceptance remain, the most critical of which are the reward structure in colleges of engineering and engineering professors own lack of pedagogical knowledge.