Date of Award

Winter 3-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Engineering Education

First Advisor

Krystal Cruse

Abstract

Engineering education has evolved over the last few decades to increasingly include project-based learning (PBL) throughout the curriculum to give students more hands-on experience. However, there can be a hesitancy from faculty and instructors to move from traditional lectures to PBL-based curricula. Research has been conducted to identify barriers to research-based instructional strategies (RBIS), which include PBL. However, this research does not go into depth about the specific barriers for these individual RBIS. Furthermore, it has been found that the adoption of a new practice within a community has more success through a propagation paradigm, where the change agents are actively involved in engaging the community to adopt the new practice, as opposed to the dissemination paradigm, which relies solely on the evidence of the success of the new practice to lead to systemic adoption. This dissertation identifies the specific barriers to PBL and introduces a new project development tool, the Project Development Canvas (PDC), which guides the user through the project development process. The research detailed in this dissertation leverages the propagation paradigm to help faculty and instructors overcome key barriers to increase the adoption of PBL in classrooms through training on the PDC. The methodology for this research is based on Action Research, a collaborative approach to bringing about change in a community through an iterative research cycle involving planning, action, analysis, and a conclusion. To propagate the framework into the engineering education community, faculty and instructors in the engineering education community were engaged through two separate workshops. The first was a local, two-day workshop held in the College of Engineering and Science at Louisiana Tech University, which provided an in-depth description and demonstration of the PDC. The second workshop was held at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) annual conference. It followed the same format as the local workshop, although somewhat abbreviated due to time restrictions. Both workshops incorporated a pre-survey and post-evaluation to gauge what barriers the attendees identified, what barriers the framework and associated workshops reduced, and whether the training increased their willingness to use PBL. The key findings of the results identify the most common PBL barriers to be “Lack of information/familiarity” and “Too much prep time,” and show that both were addressed through training on the PDC. Additionally, the results show an overwhelmingly positive change in the participants’ willingness to use projects in their classrooms. This research not only establishes this new framework tool in the engineering education community, but also provides proof that it is effective in building interest in the use of PBL in the classroom.

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