What’s Your Story?
A former National Science Foundation program officer urges engineering educators to share data and shape policy as well as practice.
By R. Alan Cheville
Over the past few decades, engineering educators have gained new insights by devising ways to measure learning and testing these measurements against theory. Such insights can have a potentially large impact on society. In a 2013 article entitled “No Place Like Home,” former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine estimated that each dollar invested in engineering education returns $5 to the economy, with each new engineer growing the economy enough to create one new job every year they work.
Insights by themselves will not lead to a more equitable or innovative society, however. To achieve meaningful impact, the engineering education community will need to transform individual insights into collective wisdom or, to borrow an analogy from a 1963 letter to Science, focus not just on making bricks but using the right bricks to build a lasting edifice. This requires practical wisdom, which includes not just theoretical knowledge but also the capacity to apply it. Practical wisdom is needed because engineering education exists in a complex ecosystem of multiple stakeholders—students, faculty, academic governance, engineering employers, information technology, and policymakers—while being constrained to a four-year degree program within a social and technological landscape undergoing rapid change.
The practical wisdom of engineering education not only needs to inform classroom practices but to guide the many stakeholders in the larger ecosystem to make better collective decisions. While our individual experiences, knowledge, and perspective are too limited to allow us to always act correctly in such an environment, effective sharing of data and stories can help guide action. The need for such sharing was brought home to me during the time I served as a program officer at the National Science Foundation. NSF’s role goes beyond funding research and includes providing data to support policy, evaluate the status of science and engineering in the United States, and align research to national needs. A program officer, like an academic department chair, straddles and connects two worlds: the research and policy communities. In this liaison role, the program officer must draw on the research community’s collective data and insights to present powerful, truthful narratives about the positive effect and benefits that funding enabled.
Sharing data is an activity that is important but not urgent, and it has real costs. Thus if data sharing is to actually occur, it must create value for both the engineering education community and the larger ecosystem. One way to create such value is to ensure data can be used to tell powerful stories. Our community needs such stories to share our successes with administrators and policymakers at all levels. While academics see education as an unalloyed good, this view is not universally shared, and there is a growing perception in the United States that the rising costs of tuition mean that higher education is somehow “broken” or inefficient. Sharing data also can help us develop a consistent vocabulary, precision in underlying concepts, and common goals. A meaningful, collective vision is becoming increasingly important to sustain external investments. A third value proposition is that sharing data will help grow and sustain networks of engineering educators. These networks are critical not only to translating the results of research into practical wisdom but also to propagating knowledge of how educators develop their expertise.
While sharing data has potential value, there are also significant challenges. One of the largest is how to connect data meaningfully across the vast education landscape so as to better understand the system as a whole. Another is ensuring that analyses of large populations are not applied blindly. If researchers are not careful about establishing guardrails, some groups may be adversely affected. Despite these challenges, the reality is that data increasingly drive decision making. Sharing data is not an end in itself but a means to an end. It offers a way to develop practical wisdom, a process Aristotle described as becoming good and wise together. The challenge for engineering educators is to learn to ask the right questions and better define the goal we collectively seek to achieve.
R. Alan Cheville, chair of electrical and computer engineering at Bucknell University and an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Education and the Journal of Engineering Education, served as the program director for engineering education in the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Directorate. This article appeared in Advances in Engineering Education’s Spring 2016 special issue on the need to share data among the greater research community.
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