Decision-Making: What Does It Have to Do with My Teaching? Research Brief

Engineering education can be thought of as a complex design activity where educators create a range of teaching artifacts including course curricula, classroom policies, lecture notes, exams, and timelines for student group projects. In order to design such artifacts, engineering faculty must make a series of teaching decisions, each of which can impact their students\u27 learning and engagement with course activities. Given the importance of decision-making in engineering education, the authors hope that by beginning to characterize engineering educator decisions, educators will gain a greater awareness of their decision-making by recognizing, characterizing, and anticipating decision points. Thus, the initial research questions driving this study were: (1) What aspects of engineering educators\u27 decision-making processes are prominent during their participation in the instructional development process?; and (2) How can engineering educators make more effective decisions? This exploratory study looks at engineering faculty decisions as expressed during the instructional development process