Collaborative Research: Strategies for Developing Integrated Resilience in Engineering Departments

This project aims to serve the national interest by developing an integrated systems model of organizational resilience in engineering departments, which characterizes relationships among student, faculty/staff, and departmental resilience. This project will then investigate the model's impact on student outcomes. Results from this project will be used to design strategies for engineering departments to systematically improve resilience across all levels over time, enabling them to better support engaged student learning in rapidly changing environments. The persistent challenges to degree completion and transition to the workforce faced by engineering students are widely recognized and a problem of great national importance. Although student resilience has been proposed as one facilitator of overcoming these obstacles, it is still not fully known how to best support the academic resilience of engineering students and the departments that serve them. This Level 1 Engaged Student Learning project seeks to advance knowledge of departmental resilience, its interrelationships with student and faculty/staff resilience, and student outcomes. The project aims to develop a validated integrated systems model of organizational resilience in engineering departments, including supporting tools, which can be used by educators and administrators to assess the resilience of their departments and test strategies for developing multi-level resilience. This project will advance understanding of how the dimensions of engineering education resilience are related and how they support engaged student learning, which will be used to develop multi-level strategies to for building resilience in engineering departments among individuals and systems. The project will result in a comprehensive integrated systems model of organizational resilience in engineering departments that adapts and validates existing organizational science models of resilience to the engineering education context. Mixed-method research will be conducted at three universities from different regions, scales, and student populations. Multi-level systems dynamics modeling will facilitate translation of research findings into a quantitative simulation model that supports the development of strategies to improve resilience. The model and key findings will be shared nationally at conferences and in journals, at professional development workshops, and through a professional learning community. Ultimately, this project is likely to enhance trajectories to the engineering workforce of the future by fostering resilient engineering departments, which are better prepared to adapt and thrive in rapidly changing technological and social environments, and which are better equipped to support the development of resilient engineers. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. 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.