Through the Lenses of Pedagogical Content Knowledge and Instructor Beliefs: Understanding Engineering Instructors' Enacted Practice

Education research has investigated teaching practices and uncovered a potential disconnect between instructors' knowledge and beliefs about teaching and their actual teaching practices. While experts of the subject matter, their understanding of teaching and their awareness of their own teaching capability significantly impact their enacted practices. However, there is a dearth of research in engineering on this aspect, particularly in electrical engineering (EE) education. EE as an applied science comprises many abstract concepts among other engineering disciplines that require strategic teaching practices to facilitate student learning. The intangible nature of these concepts, such as the foundational circuits concepts, raises the likelihood of acquiring issues in teaching among engineering instructors that can impact the construction of contextual knowledge and skills among engineering students. In this qualitative case study, the primary aim was to study the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) faculty who taught the first and second-year ECE courses at Virginia Tech. Answers were sought through the overarching research question how do engineering instructors' knowledge and beliefs about engineering teaching influence their enacted practice in teaching introductory electric circuits? using a synthesized framework of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), instructor beliefs and Watkins and Marsick's Continuous Learning Model (WMCLM). The significant findings from the analysis of interviews, class recordings, and Canvas course materials suggested that the ECE instructors' formed PCK and held beliefs can have an affirmative influence on enacted practice, meaning, their knowledge and beliefs about engineering teaching reinforced their enacted practice. This influence was apparent in their various student-centric approaches to contextualizing the ECE concepts using their combined experiences. In contrast, constructive influence captured the potential causes of "disconnect" between their formed "knowledge and beliefs" and their enacted practice. This influence was rooted in how the abstract fundamental ECE concepts, in most cases, required contexts outside of the instructors' core experiences. The attempt to use multiple strategies to attain the course goals had created oversight tendencies on their implementation magnified by the online and hybrid modality, especially with the team-teaching design of the base ECE courses. Such relevant issues needed time-constraining solutions from the course instructor to the administrative level. This work can further advance the instructional methods in EE education after understanding the influences of instructors' beliefs and knowledge on their enacted practices to teach foundational concepts in ECE. More broadly, this work will have implications for educators, curriculum designers, and researchers who seek to improve engineering instruction and address the current issues in teaching engineering. The outcomes provide research opportunities to interrogate how we can use instructional practices to design methodologies that can elucidate and solve issues on instructors' enacted practices constructively. More importantly, the results of this study can be utilized to design professional development programs for engineering teaching faculty by having a framework to continuously examine instructors' beliefs and knowledge to support their teaching practice.