Bridging from research to teaching in undergraduate engineering design education

Our goal is to promote a research-informed approach to engineering design education. Over the past eight years, we have conducted a number of studies in order to understand how engineering students do design. Some of our current efforts focus on integrating research and practice in engineering design education. Because of the complexity of real educational practice, we are working on multiple strategies to bridge the research-to-teaching gap. These include: 1) the creation of instructional activities based on our research results and 2) a workshop model to engage design educators with research on engineering student design behavior. In this paper, we present a framework for thinking about the link between research and teaching, provide detailed descriptions of the two strategies mentioned above, and discuss the effectiveness, viability, and reproducibility of these strategies.