2008 Teaching and Learning Symposium

Investigating the Teaching Decisions of Engineering Educators

Our work focuses on using a cognitive science methodology for investigating the phenomenon of teaching decision making in engineering education. Teaching decisions offer a lens for understanding engineering educators’ teaching practices. In our study, we invited engineering educators to talk about two teaching decisions that they had made, how they made each decision, and their level of satisfaction with each decision. Because we found their accounts of their decisions to be more consistent with a notion of a decision as a commitment to action (rather than a choice among alternatives), we report our findings through this lens. Specifically, we report themes related to the actions the educators chose to commit to, their processes of committing to these actions, and their reported satisfaction. Overall, the results serve as a reminder of the complexity of teaching.

Index of Symposium Presenters