Free ticketed event
Engineering education research has recently called on researchers to explore opportunities for expanding the methodologies and theoretical frameworks used in the field, with one of the most recent calls focusing on the “evolving need to capture complex phenomena in near-real-time” and advancing multi-modal approaches that would let researchers study the complexity of the human experience.
This workshop will focus on video-based data sources as one way of addressing this call and contributing to the possibilities of expansive methodologies by providing researchers with additional tools.
The workshop builds upon long traditions in the learning sciences and the design cognition and practice communities to build capacity for video-based engineering education research.
There have also been calls for advancing equity and the ways that scholars think about equity, diversity, and inclusion in engineering education, particularly for more conversations about equity that move beyond access-only paradigms to consider how educational spaces and educator actions can be transformative for creating inclusive and humanizing spaces for engaging in engineering.
New and transformative opportunities for engineering education research can address expanding research methodologies, increased uses of multi-modal approaches, and increased attention to both broadening participation and advancing equity in engineering education.
Video analysis helps with understanding the process of engineering learning because learners participate in situ; learning processes are carried out moment by moment in social interaction. Many current approaches in engineering education research tend to treat processes of learning as a “black box” that can be packaged in the form of best practices and curricular materials, and then measured as outcomes in surveys, interviews, or test scores. Video can examine processes of learning through multiple co-existent dimensions (e.g., equity and inclusion, conceptual change).
Video analysis also helps with understanding processes of engineering learning from the perspective of the people in the learning settings.
Video data of learning environments also helps researchers investigate classroom events from an intersubjective perspective that
learners, instructors, and researchers share, which can provide
important epistemological and ontological weight to learners’ views.
Video data also reveals, from the perspective of learners in the moment, the ways that microaggressions and other forms of oppression can show up in engineering learning.
Video analysis, and particularly group analysis, helps participants appreciate interpretive complexity. It can widen the circle of those involved in research, with education researchers leveraging insights to help understand their own teaching and teachers of engineering being drawn into the process through shared interpretation.
Video analysis also helps expand definitions of what counts as education or learning. By refining and redefining what engineering learning means, video can help recognize, strengthen, and broaden educational pathways for all learners.
Dr. Monica E. Cardella is the Director of the School of Universal Computing, Construction and Engineering Education at Florida International University. She is also a Professor of Engineering and Computing Education. Her teaching focuses on engineering design at the undergraduate level and analysis of video data at the graduate level. Cardella and her colleagues recently used Interaction Analysis approaches along with Powell et al’s (2003) analytic model to characterize ways that young children engage in computational thinking and engineering design as they interact with parents, teachers, and other children. Three of her projects using video data have won best paper awards: the William Elgin Wickenden Award for the best paper published in the Journal of Engineering Education (2008), Design Studies Award for the best paper published in 2018 in Design Studies, and the Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education Outstanding Research Paper Award (2021).
Dr. Milo Koretsky is the Co-Director of Institute for Research on Learning and Instruction at Tufts University. He also holds the McDonnell Family Bridge Professorship in Chemical and Biological Engineering, and is a Professor of Education. He teaches a seminar for STEM learning assistants, graduate level course on thinking and learning, and advanced kinetics and reactions. Dr. Koretsky has used video in his research as well as to help graduate teaching assistants develop teaching practices. In one of his recent projects, Dr. Koretsky video-recorded Graduate Teaching Assistants and used stimulated recall interviews where GTAs watched themselves in studio and explained their in-the-moment decision making.
Dr. Greses Pérez is the McDonnell Family Assistant Professor of Engineering Education at Tufts
University. Dr. Pérez also holds appointments in Civil and Environmental Engineering,
Mechanical Engineering, and Education. Dr. Pérez teaches graduate courses on equitable engineering. Dr. Pérez’s recent work has focused on discourse analysis of videos from elementary and undergraduate learning environments where Black and Latinx students engage in engineering design and problem solving through bilingual practices of their communities.
Dr. Stephen Secules is an Assistant Professor of Engineering Education at Florida International University. Dr. Secules teaches undergraduate engineering design courses and graduate-level courses on teaching and learning in engineering and computing education. Dr. Secules uses critical qualitative methods to look at everyday educational settings in engineering and shift them towards equity and inclusion. Dr. Secules co-founded the Equity, Culture, and Social Justice in Education Division of the American Society for Engineering Education. In a recent project, Secules used a microgenetic ethnographic approach with video data in a study to uncover the ways engineering culture constructs the category of “not cutout for engineering” (Secules et al., 2018).
Dr. Christopher Wright is an Associate Professor in the School of Education’s Teaching,
Learning, and Curriculum Development at Drexel University. Dr. Wright’s research deploys
critical perspectives while engaging in design-based research and analyzing video data.
Utilizing critical perspectives to explore how young people think, learn, and participate, Dr.
Wright calls attention to the cultural and political contexts within which these constructs emerge, as well as the consequences for engaging in design work. Informed by his teaching experiences with young people from historically marginalized communities, Dr. Wright’s work explores opportunities for privileging the voice of minoritized individuals in efforts of collaboratively reimagine STEM learning spaces that affirm, cultivate, and build upon the intellectual and linguistic resources of research partners
Dr. Tamecia Jones is an Assistant Professor of STEM Education at North Carolina State University. Dr. Jones designed a Video Research Laboratory for Engineering and Design Education at North Carolina State University and partners with K12 engineering and computer science education researchers.