2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

When adopting an instructional system, instructors need to consider several factors during its adaptation, including both instructional resources and practices. During its implementation, the system must be adaptable enough to meet students’ needs for successful learning, including the learning environment and issues of equity and inclusion. Instructors play a critical role in deciding how to meet the diverse needs of students in engineering courses based upon their knowledge of the student population, learning goals, and institutional culture. Researchers advocate for advancements in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) principles in engineering education, urging us to make education more equitable and inclusive. For that reason, discussions surrounding equity and inclusion during the implementation process of an instructional system could offer valuable insights into instructor decision-making and perceived limits to the system’s adaptability for equity and inclusion. In this research, we present two instructional system adoption cases in order to describe and explain the nuances of how instructors think about equity and apply the principles to promote equity in teaching while adapting an instructional system. We focus on how themes of equity emerged naturally in a set of interviews with instructors about their process of adaptation in which the interview protocol did not specifically focus on equity-oriented decisions. The data consisted of 14 interviews with two instructors, followed by in vivo coding and thematic analysis. Both instructors saw equity as central to their decisions around instructional system adaptation across three main categories: decisions that were (i) directly about adopting the instructional system, (ii) nested between adopting the system and their usual instructional approaches, and (iii) independent from the adopted system. Across these categories, both instructors prioritized equity in support of student outcomes. In category (i), Prof. Morris’s concern focused on how to ensure the contexts of practice problems in the system’s textbook were relevant to the lived experiences of diverse students in her classroom. Prof. Reed aimed to accommodate students’ needs and leveraged the (blended) instructional resources to offer asynchronous review sessions so that commuter students could access the sessions (category ii). The practices independent from the instructional system (category iii) included typical decisions on content coverage and timing/format of office hours. This study’s findings and implications would interest professional development designers, instructional system developers, and researchers who examine ways to promote the adoption of instructional innovations in light of instructors’ commitments to and practices about equity in engineering classrooms.