Improving engineering teaching through classroom research

There is currently worldwide interest in improving the quality of engineering education and in some instances governments have intervened to assess the quality of teaching and learning across the spectrum of subjects. There is also a view that the injection of large funds into computer assisted learning will resolve many instructional problems and reduce demand for human resources. However, these policies, many of them potentially good, have not grasped that until teaching is treated as an intellectual activity on a par with research they will not be taken seriously. This point has been made forcibly by K.P. Cross (1986) in respect of higher education and by J. Heywood (1992) in respect of teachers and school teaching. T.A. Angelo and K.P. Cross (1993) worked with many faculty in American institutions of higher education and demonstrated that this was a fairly easy task, once teachers had the will and a basic framework within which to operate. During the last 20 years major educational research has been undertaken by several engineering educators in the UK and US. There are also good examples of published classroom research in the literature of engineering education, and there are many examples of teaching innovations which, had they been evaluated, would have been judged to be classroom research. Perhaps they might have done so if they had access to an educational consultant. The paper illustrates both the potential and need for classroom research in engineering and indicates the value of consultants in specific circumstances.