Writing Effective Evaluation and Dissemination/Diffusion Plans Article Swipe
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· 2020
· Open Access
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· DOI: https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--18994
· OA: W2606001193
Writing effective evaluation and dissemination/diffusion plans This paper will summarize the output from an NSF‐sponsored workshop on writing evaluation and dissemination plans for research on innovations in engineering education. The overarching goal of the workshop was to create a document that would assist engineering educators in writing effective plans for their proposals to NSF. Recent program solicitations from the NSF Division of Undergraduate Education, “Transforming Undergraduate Education in the Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (TUES)”, explicitly ask that the leaders of TUES projects move beyond disseminating results to engage other educators in adopting the innovations that are developed. Thus, there is a need to design more than dissemination plans. Processes by which innovations are adopted (or adapted) by others studied within a field referred to as ‘diffusion of innovations’. We will adopt this terminology and use the term dissemination/diffusion plan to make clear that more than dissemination is now expected for projects funded by TUES. The workshop was organized by an interdisciplinary team from the learning sciences and engineering education. The workshop participants were similarly interdisciplinary. During the workshop four interdisciplinary teams worked through the process of creating evaluation and disseminations plans for different types of innovations in engineering education. They were asked to summarize the process for creating the plans. After the workshop, the organizing team synthesized the workshop output into a set of guiding questions and major findings. The sets of questions are intended to guide engineering educators through a systematic process of as they begin to construct evaluation and dissemination/diffusion plans. This paper will describe the workshop and present the major findings and the sets of guiding questions that resulted from the synthesis of the output from the workshop. Feedback from workshop participants will also be presented. An appendix to the paper will contain the full workshop report.
