2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this work in progress (WIP) paper we describe implicit and explicit expectations that students have of their instructors. The work is part of a larger study related to engineering students’ beliefs about teaching and learning and how those beliefs interact with curricular innovations in engineering education. Our study focuses on understanding students' responses to changes in pedagogical practices and their perception of the role of an educator. There have been many continuing efforts to increase the use of evidence-based practices in engineering education, especially those that significantly shift the role of an instructor. Such a shift is often termed as moving from ‘instructor-centered’ to ‘student-centered’ instruction. Some studies show that students believe they learn more in such instructor-centered pedagogies (i.e., lectures, but in fact learn more in student-centered (i.e., ‘active’) pedagogies (Deslauries et al., 2019). Other evidence shows that other students express and rely on different beliefs about how STEM topics are best learned (Kang, 2008). When explored with engineering faculty specifically, beliefs about knowledge and learning would frame lecture and similar pedagogies as a rational in internally consistent method of teaching (Montfort et al., 2014). However, little research on how engineering students understand learning their own learning processes and relate those processes to different pedagogies exists. Understanding students’ beliefs and their perception of good teaching can inform efforts to engage students in practices and ways to frame practices and their implementation that improve learning.

We report the results from a pilot qualitative interview study of 8 undergraduate engineering students. The study involves undergraduate students from multiple engineering disciplines at a large research-focused engineering university in the United States. Data collection used a semi-structured interview protocol derived from a protocol developed to study similar questions with pre-service science teachers of similar age and training (Kang, 2008; Kang & Oldfather, 2002). This WIP focuses on two research questions: (1) What are engineering students' stated and unstated expectations of their educators? (2) What expectations about faculty do engineering students use to differentiate perceived good and bad educators? Our results suggest that students generalize expectations of faculty as being ‘caring’. However, caring is multifaceted - including being passionate about the material they teach, having an interest in teaching, and having respect for their students. Consistent examples of ‘good’ teaching highlighted faculty efforts to develop explicit connections between course materials and students’ personal interests. Those examples seem to parallel work to align education with students’ intrinsic motivation, which students again label as a form of caring. Participants rarely mention competence or subject matter knowledge, but rather note that such characteristics can generally be assumed and are, in fact, necessary when explicitly probed. We also found suggest that students differentiate perceived good and bad educators primarily by whether faculty actions build a sense that they care about students’ as people and about their learning experience. However, multiple interviewees note cases where falsified attempts at caring can come off as disingenuous or manufactured. In the paper we compare our results to other findings in literature as a check on their credibility and suggest directions for future work.