Effective teaching practices: Preliminary analysis of engineering educators

Attendees at "frontiers in education" (FIE) conferences include a unique population of engineering educators who have a demonstrated interest in pedagogy, probably beyond that of the typical engineering faculty member who is focused on technical research. Thus this population affords a rich source of data to begin to answer the research questions of what engineering educators believe are effective teaching practices and what they actually do in the classroom. Since poor teaching has been shown to contribute to student attrition from engineering, studying the beliefs and practices of faculty who are committed to teaching may provide ideas of how to improve engineering education in general. For this study, interviews were conducted with twenty-six engineering educators at FIE06. Participants were asked to describe what they believed were effective teaching practices. Next, participants were asked to consider a list of teaching practices and rank these according to what they believed were most effective and which they actually utilized. In this work, we provide the initial results of this study thereby offering insights into the variation and degree of consensus on effective teaching among this self-selected population of engineering educators.