Analyzing the transformative nature of engineering education proposals

This study analyzed proposals submitted to the National Science Foundation's Course Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) program for the Phase/Type 1 deadlines of 2005 and 2009. The goal of this study was to characterize the nature of CCLI proposals in order to determine a baseline for examining the potential effect of the recent name change in the solicitation to Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (TUES). The name change was made to emphasize interest in projects that have the potential to transform undergraduate education in STEM fields. Therefore, we were interested in how, prior to the name change, the community conceived of what is necessary to make educational improvements and how investigators operationalized this through their project's proposed activities. We selected Phase/Type 1 engineering CCLI proposals, analyzing all funded proposals in 2005 and 2009, and selected a random sample of non-funded proposals for comparison purposes. The percentage of proposals analyzed each year was consistent and represents approximately 30% of submissions received that year. Furthermore, since our sample included approximately 200 proposals, we coded and analyzed data only from the Project Summary. Results showed statistically significant differences between funded and non-funded proposals in line with several "transformative" categories taken from the literature as well as based on the TUES review criteria of intellectual merit and broader impact. In addition, we found statistically significant differences in several categories between proposals submitted in 2005 and 2009. This paper reports these findings and discusses how proposals submitted to the CCLI/TUES program align with various aspects of educational transformation discussed in the literature.