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The National Academy of Engineering's Engineer of 2020 strongly encourages colleges and universities to prepare engineers who understand that engineering problems -as well as their solutions -are embedded in complex social, cultural, political, environmental, and economic contexts. Developing solutions that account for this enlarged problem space require engineers to access, understand, evaluate, synthesize, and apply information and knowledge from engineering as well as other fields of study. Researchers are just beginning to examine how engineering students learn to synthesize and use knowledge from different fields, and few tools have been developed to date to assess such interdisciplinary learning.In this paper we describe the development and testing of a measure of interdisciplinary competence. We identify eight dimensions of interdisciplinary competence that emerged from an extensive literature review: 1) awareness of disciplinarity; 2) appreciation of disciplinary perspectives; 3) appreciation of non-disciplinary perspectives; 4) recognition of disciplinary limitations; 5) interdisciplinary evaluation; 6) ability to find common ground; 7) reflexivity; and 8) integrative skill. We next describe how these dimensions were operationalized as a set of survey items, refined through focus groups with engineering faculty, and pilot tested. Following this development process, the items were administered to undergraduates in 30 U.S. engineering schools as part of an NSF-funded study entitled, Prototype to Production: Processes and Conditions for Preparing the Engineer of 2020.The paper next presents information on the formation of (using factor analysis) and descriptive characteristics (e.g., reliabilities) of the three interdisciplinary competence scales that emerged from this process. Additional analyses demonstrate the ability of the scales to distinguish among students in different class years and engineering disciplines.

Background A report from the American Society for Engineering Education (Jamieson & Lohmann, 2012) identified career‐long professional development for faculty, teacher training in graduate programs, departmental climates that value and support educational innovation, and reward systems that recognize achievements in educational innovation as mechanisms to improve undergraduate engineering education. These factors have long been assumed to influence faculty members' choices to engage in educational improvements, but their relationships with teaching practices rarely have been studied. Purpose We examined the relationships among professional development, departmental contexts, and engineering faculty members' use of student‐centered teaching practices. Design/Method This study drew on a nationally representative survey dataset of 906 engineering faculty members from 31 four‐year institutions. We used multiple regression analyses to investigate whether graduate training, professional development, and institutional factors (e.g., reward systems) relate to engineering faculty members' use of student‐centered teaching practices, such as active learning and frequent and detailed feedback to students. Results Professional development activities and, to a lesser extent, graduate training in teaching positively related to the use of student‐centered teaching practices. We provide some of the first evidence that graduate training in teaching is linked to the use of student‐centered teaching practices. Only modest relationships were observed between departmental environments and teaching practices. Conclusion Engineering departments seeking to increase the use of student‐centered teaching practices should consider supporting faculty engagement in on‐ and off‐campus professional development activities. Supporting these activities may be more effective than emphasizing research on engineering education and curriculum enhancement in reward decisions.

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Small class size is often used as an indicator of quality in higher education, and some research suggests that instructors in smaller classes more often use activities that are learner-centered and that involve physical and mental activity on the part of learners, such as group work, simulations, and case studies. However, we have little information on how instructors change their pedagogical practice when they teach in large-versus small-class settings. In this study, we examine alignment between intended and enacted teaching strategies, or initial plans and specific ways in which instructors reported altering their teaching in the context of a university policy shift to smaller classes. Furthermore, we examine instructional challenges in this shift to call attention to professional development needs of small-class teaching and to best leverage the benefits of such activities for student performance and retention.