Session F3C 1-4244-1084-3/07/$25.00 ©2007 IEEE October 10 – 13, 2007, Milwaukee, WI 37 th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference F3C-7 Effective Teaching Practices: Preliminary Analysis of Engineering Educators Susan M. Lord and Michelle Madsen Camacho Engineering Department and Sociology Department, University of San Diego San Diego, CA 92110 slord@sandiego.edu and mcamacho@sandiego.edu Abstract - 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. Index Terms - engineering education, free list method, pedagogy, teaching practices INTRODUCTION Numerous studies and reports have called for improvement in modern engineering education [1, 2, 3, 4]. Since poor teaching by engineering faculty has been shown to be a contributing factor to student attrition from engineering [5, 6, 7], studying the beliefs and practices of faculty who are committed to teaching may provide ideas of how to improve engineering education in general. Attendees at Frontiers in Education (FIE) conferences comprise a diverse 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. Although faculty may hold popular beliefs about what constitutes effective teaching, few researchers have conducted systematic studies to provide data to theorize these beliefs. In this paper, we discuss our methodology and provide the initial results of this study including summarizing the demographic information on the participants as well as qualitative analysis of the open-ended responses. Consistent with common intuition that teaching is not an exact science, our data reveal that most participants engage in multiple, overlapping teaching practices. However there is some consensus in the teaching practices deemed to be most important. Among the top ranking beliefs for “effective teaching” were 1) an inquiry-driven/inductive approach 2) building a sense of community in the classroom and 3) self- awareness of the professor. Our qualitative research is data- driven, therefore, rather than imposing definitions of these categories, we allowed the respondents to craft their own meanings and explanations. This paper presents the participants’ descriptions using their actual voices and our preliminary analyses of the most salient categories. METHODOLOGY Prior to the FIE conference held in San Diego 2006, we accessed the comprehensive list of faculty who had pre- registered and invited them to join a study on “effective teaching practices.” To qualify for the IRB-approved study, participants were limited to faculty with engineering degrees who are currently tenured or in tenure track positions at four- year institutions in the U.S. or Canada. The FIE pool of respondents is part of a larger population selected for our analysis of pedagogical practices. The entire pool consists of two distinct groups: 1) “pedagogy experts” (non-engineer) who rely on critical models of pedagogical inquiry such as “liberative” or “feminist” approaches to teaching identified via a purposive sampling technique and 2) faculty in engineering programs who may or may not be engaged in similar critical modes of teaching. Because some engineering faculty (i.e. FIE attendees) place greater value on teaching than others, we sought to explore these differences. Thus the category, FIE attendees, emerged as an authentic subgroup within the “engineering” pool of faculty members. For a larger study, we will explore how FIE attendees differ from engineering faculty who have never attended a conference related to “teaching practices”. Our approach to selecting research subjects at the national 2006 Frontiers in Education Conference involved 1) sending a