Seeds of change: can replicating model projects work? [engineering education]

Many new initiatives in engineering education are supported, if not prompted, by the National Science Foundation and other funding organizations committed to improving the quality of programs and instruction developing the professionals involved in teaching and learning, and seeding new initiatives. These funding organizations support principal investigators as change agents, and generally would like to see that the initiatives they "seed" through grants are widely disseminated and replicated in other locations. Grant proposal guidelines often request proposed principal investigators to undertake activities to disseminate their work so that its effects will offer benefits more broadly than one individual\´s students, classroom, or institution. After thoughtful design, peer review, success in funding competitions, implementation, formative evaluation, improvements, and summative evaluation, many successful initiatives in engineering education should theoretically be able to be widely adopted by others in new locations. But can such replication be deliberately planned and encouraged, or is it exclusively dependent upon the serendipity of ensuring that program descriptions and results reach the right people at the right time? Using the example of "Partners in Engineering Problem Solving," (PEPS) an experimental program funded by the National Science Foundation, this paper and discussion considers to what extent planned replication is possible, and what factors appear to support or inhibit such replication.