IUSE/PFE:RED Innovation: SP3 Materials Education

This RED Innovation (Track 3) project will transform this department to produce more career-ready graduates with improved conceptual understanding, problem solving skills, and critical thinking skills, and greater comfort with data, uncertainty, and applications of computational tools, including AI. Currently, at this institution and elsewhere, undergraduate engineering students in the second and third years of their program struggle to build upon and communicate their knowledge gained in one isolated course into subsequent courses, and transfer that knowledge into new contexts, including workplaces. As a result, instructors spend valuable time reteaching core concepts instead of extending students' learning into new areas, let alone providing them with opportunities to experience other important realities of engineering workplaces such as those prompted by emerging technologies. Such challenges occur in part due to instructors' isolated teaching of courses arranged into strict sequences in a curriculum, and are made worse when departments and key stakeholders (including faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, employers, and alumni) do not collaborate sufficiently on course development. This project will use a theory-driven approach to change department culture (in the way different stakeholders collaborate to develop new instructional content), pedagogy (in the way instructional content is delivered), structure (in terms of the data/computational infrastructure) and organization (in terms of programs and incentives for teaching innovation). The project will build on prior federal investments to develop a shared vision of, and then implement, a connected instructional model designed to cultivate students’ knowledge and, critically, their ability to transfer that knowledge to new contexts, better preparing career-ready engineers who confidently apply their knowledge and emerging computational tools in new contexts in materials engineering, including key industries such as defense, advanced manufacturing, quantum computing, microelectronics, and critical minerals engineering. The project will also provide evidence of how effective centering a cultural and organizational shift on a curricular shift can be, with the resulting second-order change model influencing materials engineering education nationally, and informing the fields of engineering education research organizational change research more broadly. The Metallurgical and Materials Engineering (MME) Department at Colorado School of Mines, in partnership with the Alumni Advisory Board and Mines leadership, will shift the undergraduate materials engineering education to a connected instructional model designed to cultivate students’ knowledge and, critically, their ability to transfer that knowledge to new contexts. To bring about this change, the project will draw on Kezar's Change Macro Framework and Lund and Stain's Instructional Innovation Design Process in their "SP3" model – structure, properties, performance, and processing - to inspire and support pedagogical innovation, shift department culture, and solidify such changes into organizational policy and practice. Through project activities, department stakeholders will form communities of transformation in order to redesign key existing and interacting course sequences by connecting content together using product threads (such as using the concept of a cell phone to help students integrate content across multiple courses), knowledge transfer themes (such as data literacy and fluency, engineering judgement, and contextualized professional communication), and vertically integrated projects (running across the second through final years). The project team will create a Materials Data & Computational Tools Hub that integrates data literacy, high fidelity simulation, and AI through pilot MME courses, based on integrated pillars of a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) compliant materials data platform, a centralized JupyterHub on campus network nodes and workstations with specific preloaded software, and a version-controlled library of GitLab notebooks instructors can remix each term. The project team will initiate institutional change activities around increasing incentives and rewards for teaching innovation, including recognizing change activities in faculty promotion and tenure processes, and sustaining a lecture exchange for instructional peer feedback. Finally, research and evaluation activities – through extensive data collection through validated instruments, open-ended survey questions, individual and group interviews, and bibliometrics, and subsequent multi-modal analysis – will inform the research team to enable early identification of successful change processes (and alert change agents to when additional project support is necessary), and the relevant research communities about the effectiveness of second order change process within an engineering department, and other project features. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.