Background Many reports present a vision of what engineering education should look like,

Background Studies have highlighted the importance for engineers of leadership, adaptability to change, and synthesis of multiple perspectives. Yet only a few studies and instruments have explored the operational definitions of these concepts for engineering undergraduates.Purpose The goals of this research were to identify observable outcomes that engineering undergraduate students should demonstrate related to leadership, adaptability to change, and synthesis abilities and to create an instrument to assess them.Design/Method In the first phase of the study, 12 engineers working in academia and 11 engineers working in industry were interviewed. The transcripts were analyzed using a constant comparative method to determine constructs related to leadership, change, and synthesis. In the second phase of the study, survey items were developed and administered to 753 engineering undergraduate students in the spring of 2011. An exploratory factor analysis determined the common factors across the survey items. ResultsThe mixed methods approach resulted in the creation of 45 survey items catego-

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This chapter provides faculty with design principles based on the How People Learn framework, as well as current best practices for designing engaged learning environments in STEM classes in the hope of continuing improvement in STEM education.

In 1999, bioengineering and learning science faculties at four research universities began collaboration on a National Science Foundation-supported Engineering Research Center. The Vanderbilt-Northwestern-Texas-Harvard/MIT Engineering Research Center for Bioengineering Education and Technology is the first such Center to have a specific focus on postsecondary education. Within this project, educators, learning scientists, and bioengineers collaborated to develop the VaNTH Observation System, an assessment tool to capture quantitatively teaching and learning experiences of the bioengineering classroom. The four components of the instrument address the professor's interaction with students, students' lesson engagement, narrative notes, and research-based measures of effective teaching. As professors redesigned lessons to incorporate current learning theory as a guide, observers measured differences in bioengineering classroom experiences resulting from these innovations. Results indicate that the observation instrument captures differences in classroom experiences, and these differences relate to a lesson's incorporation of current learning theory. I. INTRODUCTIONFor the past three years, the bioengineering and learning sciences faculties at Vanderbilt University, Northwestern University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Health Sciences and Technology Program of Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have collaborated in an NSF-supported Center for Research in Bioengineering Educational Technologies. The mission of this Center, named VaNTH for the collaborating institutions, is to "…integrate learning science, learning technologies, and the domains of bioengineering in order to develop effective educational resources to prepare for the future of bioengineering" [1]. The research efforts of the Center involve four thrusts: learning science, assessment and evaluation, learning technology, and bioengineering domains. Of particular interest within the assessment and evaluation group has been the development of an observation instrument to capture instructional differences in bioengineering classrooms.As bioengineers and learning scientists began working together, they determined to draw on and incorporate into bioengineering classrooms the most current, research-based knowledge on effective teaching and learning. Much of this knowledge is laid out in How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School [2]. This monograph of the National Research Council explains the "How People Learn" (HPL) theory as applied to mainly K-12 classrooms. At the heart of HPL theory are four types of "centeredness" that occur both singularly and concurrently in effective classrooms: elements of a lesson may be knowledge-centered, learner-centered, assessment-centered, and/or community-centered. Knowledge-centered elements focus on information and procedures that constitute a domain of knowledge. Learner-centered elements cause students to make linkages to prior knowledge and experience. Assessmentcentered elem...