A Personalized Learning Model for STEM Graduate Education

Moving away from a “one-size-fits-all” strategy for graduate engineering students, the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering will create and validate a personalized learning model (PLM) for graduate STEM education. The approach will be piloted in Chemical Engineering, where the impact on both students and faculty will be rigorously assessed. The personalized approach directly addresses issues of inclusivity by removing barriers to participation by underrepresented minorities. The innovation of this project lies in the integration of its components into a department-wide model that can be translated to any STEM field, directly addressing a well-known challenge in the STEM community: diffusion of educational innovations.

In a press release from Swanson School of Engineering, PI Fullerton said, “Graduate students have unique career goals that most often do not involve becoming a professor – yet, that’s how we train them. Most of our students go into industry, not academia, and increasingly we have students who are passionate about starting their own companies, but the graduate curriculum is the same for all these students and professional development is not a priority.”

• View project poster from the 2024 PI Meeting here
• Read the abstract here
• Learn more with Pitt’s Swanson Engineering news

Are you a faculty or administrator in a STEM-related program?  Our external evaluator, Quality Evaluation Designs (QED), wants to gauge the adoptability of the personalized learning model (PLM) innovation in other STEM graduate programs. Would you be willing to receive more information and participate in a brief but informative interview? Please help by sharing your interest through this link. Don’t worry, QED respects your time: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/IGEInterviewForm