2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The educational literature provides a roadmap for instructors and institutions that want to close equity gaps in coursework pass rates and degree outcomes for underrepresented minority (URM) students which include students who identify as Black, Hispanic, and/or Native American. It is to transition teaching methods from Transmission, telling students how to do things, to Inquiry, which has been shown to improve teaching and learning outcomes by incorporating students’ prior knowledge, ideas, and life experiences into the learning process, including unique questions, backgrounds, and connections they make to course content. In contrast to Inquiry, the ubiquitous Transmission method is mainly relied upon by instructors teaching large, gateway undergraduate engineering courses where the instructor is the keeper of the static knowledge that matters to students and students report they rely on their instructors to learn and are not developing their own learning methods and expertise. Inquiry encourages students to engage, identify their questions and misconceptions, design experiments and use evidence in the process of improving their understanding. By adopting Inquiry as the primary teaching method in engineering, instructors facilitate and guide students in the learning process, clarifying student prior knowledge, incorporating student questions and misconceptions, and eliciting student ideas about how they learn.

This paper presents findings from our research partnership, consisting of a psychometrician who is also Curriculum Advisor of Computer Science at Baskin Engineering at UC Santa Cruz and two faculty members in Computer Science and Engineering . We met weekly over the course of the academic year 2021-2022 to explore and refine our own understandings of what it means to teach and assess with Inquiry, and to develop practical examples to demonstrate Inquiry teaching as applied to engineering content. During our meetings, we unpacked evidence of equity gaps, explored methods for teaching that close them, and innovated practical examples of engineering content that illustrate pre and post differences, teaching before and after making the transition. Our efforts allowed us to design the Inquiry Teaching and Learning (ITL) framework as it relates specifically to the challenges engineering instructors face and offers a suggested pathway forward for faculty and programs that intend to transition from Transmission to Inquiry teaching, improve student learning to better resemble the thinking and work of engineers, and reduce persistent and historic equity gaps in engineering education.

By using institutional outcomes and pass rate data from our large, high stakes, foundational computer science course, CSE12 or Computer Systems and Assembly language, we were able to measure the efficacy of Inquiry teaching for improving student achievement by comparing results to previous course offerings before this pedagogical transition. The data analysis and course outcomes comparison suggest a significant reduction in the equity gap between URM and non-URM students because of the transition to Inquiry. We present the evidence of this and propose Inquiry and the ITL framework as what is needed to foster a new teaching mindset for faculty, undergraduate tutors, and teaching assistants that will improve student learning and close equity gaps between student subgroup populations.