CASEE Research Affiliate: Northwestern Center Engineering Education Research (NCEER)
Research Focus:
NCEER is a research center within Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. NCEER’s mission is to advance knowledge on scholarship of teaching and learning within the disciplines of engineering by facilitating rigorous approaches to education research.
NCEER is an umbrella organization for education-focused activities within the school of engineering. It serves as an entity to map significant research problems within engineering education with appropriate people and funding possibilities. The center aims to deepen our understanding of how engineering students learn and of how engineering education can make effective improvements. NCEER encourages interdisciplinary collaboration within McCormick, cross-disciplinary work with other schools at Northwestern, and multi-institutional investigations among centers of excellence elsewhere.
NCEER affiliates are engaged in a range of research activities that span several topic areas. Below are examples of topics, and related questions, currently under investigation.
- Adaptive expertise
- What are the competencies required for one to be innovative?
- What instructional strategies are effective for developing adaptive expertise with actual engineering learners and faculty?
- Engineering thinking
- What is the nature of engineering knowledge?
- How do engineers think through problems? What knowledge do they draw on, and how is this knowledge synthesized to develop effective solutions?
- Entrepreneurship
- What are core knowledge, skills, attitudes or competencies that embody an entrepreneurial mindset?
- How might we build an effective program/curriculum to instill entrepreneurship in students?
Contact Information:
Ann McKenna, Ph. D.
Co-Director, NCEER
Northwestern University
2133 Sheridan Road, G319
Evanston, IL 60208
Voice: 847-491-6761
Email: mckenna@northwestern.edu