IUSE/PFE:RED A&I: Engineering for All: Evidence-Based Transformation of the Department of Engineering Sciences and Materials at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez

This project in the Department of Engineering Sciences and Materials at the University of Puerto Rico–Mayagüez (UPRM) will coordinate the redesign of three multi-section required courses that serve all undergraduate engineering students. Activities under this project will include changes to the practices, policies, and culture required to make such a redesign institutionally sustained after 5 years. At the classroom level, the project will (1) integrate into the target courses active, writing-intensive, and problem/project-based learning strategies; (2) create Peer-Led Study Groups to foster collaborative learning; and (3) develop and adopt “human-in-the-loop” AI models to give timely formative feedback to students. At the departmental level, new faculty collaboration and training efforts will support these course-level changes, including a new departmental Teaching Institute, Communities of Practice, and AI-informed dashboards for student performance indicators, to develop and sustain a culture of continuous co-development. The departmental changes will inform new institutional policies for workload, recognition, and promotion, backed by senior institutional leadership participation and commitment, to establish a new baseline of work expectations for faculty. The activities will improve graduation rates, allowing more students to enter the U.S. technical workforce sooner. The project will produce an adaptive, data-informed organizational change model in which peer institutions seeking similar curricular modernizations can ground their own plans for reform. As a result of this project, graduates at UPRM and elsewhere should become more skilled at applying AI-informed engineering knowhow and practices to other aspects of life, contributing to a more technologically literate citizenry. The project has five goals: (1) foster intradepartmental collaboration to shift cultural norms for course development and assessment; (2) promote faculty development and co-teaching; (3) change faculty incentives, reward systems, and workload policies; (4) boost early engineering progression indicators; and (5) contribute to national knowledge regarding institutional change to enhance engineering education. To achieve goals 1 and 2 faculty will co-design targeted courses and process-oriented assessment rubrics, deploy peer-led study groups, and use the Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence Pedagogy Framework to expand the use of AI tools. The research team will use data collected through classroom observations, student writing artifacts, and interviews with key participants and stakeholders to understand which instructional routines and practices instructors most value and adopt, and why, mapped to the department change framework. Goal 3 will leverage senior administrators’ involvement in the project to enact new workload recognition practices and policies. Progress on Goals 1-3 will help achieve Goal 4. Research activities will explore change at the student, faculty, and institutional levels. The project will produce research findings with strong external validity, reusable research instruments, new data conventions, publicly open and calibrated course packets, and durable incentive and policy models for evidence-based teaching, leading to achievement of Goal 5. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2550936 | Program: 04002627DB NSF STEM Education,01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Aidsa Santiago-Roman | Institution: University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez, MAYAGUEZ, PR | Award Amount: $1,000,000 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2550936 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2550936.html