The PR2OVE-IT website is a dynamic and evolving digital clearinghouse that summarizes the available research on educational interventions designed to enhance student learning, retention, and professional success in post-secondary engineering and other allied sciences. It is intended to be a tool for translating education research on interventions into practical classroom use by engineering faculty who are not engaged in educational research. The goal of PR2OVE-IT is to "characterize studies constituting the education research for 'best practices' in instruction and assessment without making judgments of quality' and is based on the premise that consolidation and characterization of the engineering education literature would constitute a valuable resource for engineering faculty to consult current, innovative, and 'best' pedagogical practices.
The website is divided into two major categories for searching and viewing information about articles: interventions (instructional practices) and outcomes (the main result(s) of the study). The website provides three additional major categories for more refined searching: subject/content area (content and/or context of the learning environment), study characteristics (basic information about each study), and evaluation (method by which the intervention was assessed).
Each article chosen for inclusion in the database was determined by us to meet all five of the following criteria: 1) it had an educational intervention; 2) the intervention was at the undergraduate level; 3) the intervention was in a science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) field; 4) it discussed an outcome (no matter how anecdotal); 5) the outcome was related to improved learning or performance, retention, or assessment (and not simply student satisfaction).
Acknowledgments
Partial support for this project was provided by the National Science Foundation, DUE 041218.
The following National Academies Christine Mirzayan Science & Technology Policy Graduate Fellows contributed to the development of the website and the content of the database:
- Nancy Adams, University of Hawaii
- Melissa Dupree, University of Pennsylvania
- Sarah Hunt, University of Georgia
- Amit Mistry, Rice University
- Lily Tong, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Aaron Weaver, University of Michigan
The website is currently maintained by the Engineering Pathway educational digital library.