2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Evaluating Teaching Culture Change within a Mechanical Engineering Department

Presented at Faculty Development and Change

This research paper examines the entire cycle of culture change evaluation within our project, Teams for Creating Opportunities for Revolutionizing the Preparation of Students (TCORPS), that was funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) IUSE/PFE: Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments (IUSE/PFE: RED) grant. The project’s efforts focused on a Department of Mechanical Engineering (MEEN) at a large R1 university. The MEEN department has a history of employing a static and individualistic approach to teaching with changes often coming top-down. The goal of our project is to transform the teaching culture within the department to a bottom-up team structure where faculty embrace an innovative mindset in their teaching, faculty possess a sense of ownership and influence in change, a sustainable process of incremental improvement in teaching is encouraged by leadership, and the learning needs of the department’s increasingly diverse student population are considered and fulfilled.

Within this paper, various sources of data were analyzed to answer the question, "Did culture change happen within the MEEN department?". One of the sources analyzed was qualitative data gathered from pre-implementation and post-implementation interviews done with faculty members. The pre-implementation interviews were conducted before initiating major project-related activities, with the purpose of obtaining a baseline assessment of the departmental teaching culture. The post-implementation interviews were conducted after the completion of the project to understand how faculty perceptions of the departmental teaching culture may have changed throughout the project’s duration. Another source of data was the results of the climate survey that we administered multiple times a year throughout the duration of the grant project. Analysis of the survey data aided in quantitatively understanding how faculty perceptions around teaching self-efficacy, time restrictions and competing priorities, the climate for teaching and teaching innovation, and readiness to change (individually and collectively) changed over the course of the project.

One of our project's main efforts was faculty development, which we hypothesized, along with support for teaching innovation, would help shift the department's teaching culture. Over the multi-year grant, three cohorts of faculty-led teams developed small, incremental pedagogical innovations to implement into existing course curricula. Teams that were selected also participated in a summer faculty development workshop series that provided training on areas such as incremental innovation, goal setting, and student outcome measurement. We analyzed various data related to this faculty development initiative. One key quantitative dataset included the use of a systematic rubric to evaluate teaching innovation proposals submitted by faculty before and after the workshop, as well as their post-workshop reflections. This assessed the improvement and impact of the workshop in supporting faculty as they formulate their teaching ideas. Additionally, we collected monthly progress reports from the project teams and observational data from the teams’ meetings. Our traditional lecture presentation will focus on the insights gathered from these sources of data to answer our overarching research question of whether or not culture change occurred within the department.

Authors

Emma Edoga M.S. Texas A&M University [biography]

Emma is an PhD student in the Industrial-Organizational Psychology program at Texas A&M University. Her research interests center around issues related to workplace diversity & inclusion, the experiences of Black women in the workplace, the effects of stigmatization and stereotyping, and authenticity/identity. She also has conducted research within the engineering education space, specifically focusing on teaching culture change and faculty perceptions of culture change.
Dr. Rujun Gao http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3095-8215 Texas A&M University [biography]

Dr. Rujun Gao has completed her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University and holds an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Zhejiang University, China. Her research focuses on Generative AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), LLM Agents, and the development of educational technology products.
Dr. Mindy Bergman [biography]

Dr. Bergman is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Executive Director of Interdisciplinary Critical Studies at Texas A&M University. She earned her PhD in industrial-organizational psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Prof. Arun R Srinivasa http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9825-7482 Texas A&M University [biography]

Dr Arun Srinivasa is the J. N. Reddy Chair of Applied Mechanics and Associate Dean for Student Success at the College of Engineering. He has been with TAMU since 1997. Prior to that he was a faculty at University of Pittsburgh. He received his undergraduate
Yanai Y Otero La Porte Texas A&M University
M Cynthia Hipwell http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7500-9785 Texas A&M University [biography]

Dr. Hipwell has been working in the area of technology development based upon nanoscale phenomena for over 20 years. She received her B.S.M.E. from Rice University and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Upon graduation, she went to work at Seagate Technology’s Recording Head Division in Bloomington, Minnesota. During her time at Seagate, Dr. Hipwell held various individual and leadership positions in the areas of reliability, product development, and advanced mechanical and electrical technology development. In these various roles, she established new business processes and an organizational culture that focused on developing innovative solutions from root cause understanding, improved pace of learning, and discipline in experimentation and configuration management. She was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2016 for her leadership in the development of technologies to enable areal density and reliability increases in hard disk drives and was elected a National Academy of Inventors Fellow in 2018. Dr. Hipwell is currently the Oscar S. Wyatt, Jr. ’45 Chair II at Texas A&M University, where she has developed new classes on innovation and technology development as part of her leadership of the INVENT (INnoVation tools and Entrepreneurial New Technology) Lab. She is Co-PI on a National Science Foundation engineering education grant to develop a culture of and tools for iterative experimentation and continuous improvement in curriculum development.
David Christopher Seets Texas A&M University
Dr. Karan Watson P.E. Texas A&M University [biography]

Karan L. Watson, Ph.D., P.E., is currently a Regents Senior Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, having joined the faculty at Texas A&M University in 1983 as an Assistant Professor. She is also serving as the C0-Director of the Institute
Claire Bowman-Callaway Texas A&M University

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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