2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In the Chemical Engineering department at a large public R1 university, we are working on changing the culture of our department through a multipronged approach involving students, faculty, and alumni. In working towards this change, we are gathering data from our stakeholders with the goal of initiating substantial and lasting change. In this WIP, we will share our data gathering process and some of our early feedback from our faculty, who will be agents of this change. Our initial step in the process was a series of focus groups to better understand the needs and frustrations of current students and faculty. From analysis of the focus group data, we curated ten rough “goals” for the departmental change effort. These ten goals were then brought to a faculty retreat in which the faculty helped brainstorm to formulate three overarching aims for our shared vision of the departmental change efforts. One of these aims was to incorporate Evidence-Based Instructional Practices (EBIPS) into our teaching strategies by educating our faculty in EBIPs in ways that highlight their direct applicability to the courses we teach.

Next, we designed a faculty survey with questions to explore faculty attitude to growth mindset in teaching chemical engineering. Our hypothesis is that faculty who have a fixed mindset may resist incorporating EBIPs into their teaching.

Part of this survey presented the following three statements, (adopted from Yeager 2022, Canning 2019) and asked whether respondents agreed or disagreed on a 6-point Likert scale

(1) People have a certain amount of intelligence, and they really can't do much to change it.
(2) Being a top chemical engineering student requires a special talent that can't be taught.
(3) Successfully completing a chemical engineering degree requires a special talent that can't be taught.

for which we achieved a 75% response rate. Preliminary results show that faculty somewhat disagree with (1), are neutral/somewhat disagree with (2), and disagree with (3). There is a large standard deviation with these responses, especially for (2). Although faculty believe, on average, that all students can learn chemical engineering, faculty feel that some inherent intelligence or skill is needed, indicating that at least some of our faculty do not subscribe to a growth mindset. Faculty are less convinced about all students being capable of becoming a top student. When we look at these same questions but separate out full tenured professors from all other faculty, we see that the full tenured professors tend more towards agreeing with the statements than the other faculty. Similarly, when separating faculty between white males and other groups (all minorities grouped together including females and non-white males), we see that the white male group tends to lean more towards agreeing with the statements than the other group. In this WIP, we will discuss these differences and report back in more detail on the findings from this survey, which also includes faculty perceptions on student learning and the support necessary for change.

Yeager, D.S., Carroll, J.M., Buontempo, J., Cimpian, A., Woody, S., Crosnoe, R., Muller, C., Murray, J., Mhatre, P., Kersting, N. and Hulleman, C., 2022. Teacher mindsets help explain where a growth-mindset intervention does and doesn’t work. Psychological Science, 33(1), pp.18-32. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211028984

Canning, E.A., Muenks, K., Green, D.J. and Murphy, M.C., 2019. STEM faculty who believe ability is fixed have larger racial achievement gaps and inspire less student motivation in their classes. Science advances, 5(2), p.eaau4734.