Dr. Cindy Finelli is engaged in research at the University of Michigan to design and implement an institutional change plan to promote widespread faculty adoption of effective teaching practices. The plan is grounded in research about faculty motivation, evidence-based teaching practices, and faculty professional development, and it uses local data collected from faculty focus groups, classroom observations, and student surveys. Dr. Finelli will present findings from her research and describe the resulting change plan. She will highlight implications for faculty wishing to adopt evidence-based teaching practices, for administrators and faculty developers interested in promoting change, and for engineering education researchers engaged in related efforts.

Biography

Dr. Finelli is Director of the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching in Engineering and research associate professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. She actively engages in engineering education research, assists other engineering faculty in accomplishing their educational research endeavors, and promotes institutional change through faculty professional development. Her current funded research includes projects to study faculty motivation to adopt effective teaching practices, change the culture of teaching and learning at the University of Michigan, and explore ethical decision-making in undergraduate engineering students. Dr. Finelli leads an international initiative to create a keyword outline for the field of engineering education research and she is a Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education.