2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The capacity-building project builds and strengthens faculty communities and develops a culture of inquiry and conversations that are evidence-based and data-informed – with the goal of creating readiness for transformation. It is funded by the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE: EDU) program, Institutional and Community Transformation (ICT) track.

This capacity-building project is designed to motivates faculty to consider evidence-based teaching strategies as they collaboratively explore questions on student learning and success in introductory and foundational undergraduate STEM courses, including early engineering courses and its prerequisite math and science courses. The change framework for intentional capacity building by creating faculty communities and course-level data dashboards to inform changes in instructional practices and curriculum is described in Chan Hilton (2024) and Chan Hilton and Blunt (2022). This project explores engineering education change in the context of a public, regional, primarily undergraduate institution (PUI) in the Midwest.

The project provides opportunities for faculty engagement at multiple “doses”, including semester-long faculty learning communities and working groups, annual workshops, and mini-activities. This paper and poster summarize the mini-activities that were developed and implemented each semester. Each mini-activity is a brief (about 15 minutes in duration), interactive activity in which a brief scenario is used as the context for small group discussions using provided prompts. The purpose of the mini-activities is introduce instructional strategies and facilitate discussion and sharing and generate interest in the faculty communities. One example mini-activities was exploring how aggregate data for students enrolled in an introductory course inform teaching considerations and strategies. Another example is reviewing sample syllabus language to identify opportunities support inclusive and growth mindset learning environments. The mini-activities were implemented at the college-wide semester kick-off meeting each semester and have been institutionalized as a result of this project.