About

Robin Adams is a Professor of Engineering Education and the Director of Engineering Education at Purdue University. His office is located in ARMS 1339, and he can be contacted via phone at (765) 496-3267 or email at rsadams@purdue.edu. His professional focus is on engineering education, and he is affiliated with the Engineering Education unit within Purdue's College of Engineering. The page indicates his involvement in undergraduate and graduate engineering programs, as well as his participation in various initiatives and research areas related to engineering education. Specific details about his research focus, background, or key contributions are not provided in the text.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Sociology
• Engineering
• Software engineering
• Engineering management
• Programming language
• Political Science
• Public relations
• Knowledge management
• Data science
• Aesthetics
• Art
• Psychology
• Engineering ethics
• World Wide Web

Selected publications

• Are Standardized Tests Sensitive to Early Cognitive Change in Parkinson’s Disease?

  Psychopharmacology Bulletin · 2025-08-12 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Introduction: Cognitive deficits within the first years of Parkinson's disease (PD) diagnosis are commonly reported, and progression to dementia greatly impacts independence. Identifying measures sensitive to early changes is critical for trials of symptomatic therapies and neuroprotection. Methods: A sample of 253 newly diagnosed PD patients and 134 Health Controls (HC) completed a brief cognitive battery annually over a 5-year period through the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI). The battery included standardized measures of memory, visuospatial functions, processing speed, working memory, and verbal fluency. Inclusion criterion for HCs was performance above a cutoff for possible Mild Cognitive Impairment (pMCI) on cognitive screening (MoCA ⩾ 27) The PD sample was therefore divided to match HCs on baseline cognitive testing (PD-normal n = 169; PD-pMCI n = 84). The multivariate approach to repeated measures examined rates of change between groups on cognitive measures. Results: An interaction indicating slightly greater decline over time in PD-normal relative to HCs was observed on a measure of working memory: letter-number sequencing. Differential rates of change were not observed on any other measures. Motor symptoms on the dominant right upper extremity accounted for performance differences on a test with writing demands (Symbol-Digit Modality Test). PD-pMCI performed worse than PD-normal on all cognitive measures at baseline, but did not decline faster. Discussion: Working memory appears to decline slightly faster in early PD compared to HCs, while other domains remain similar. Within PD, faster decline was not associated with lower baseline cognition. These findings have implications for clinical trial outcome selection and study design.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• BOARD #480: Creating a Course “Dashboard” to Continually Assess and Improve the Quality of Education

  2025-08-21

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• A design team’s perspective-mixing for shared empathic understandings

  CoDesign · 2024-02-13 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Empathic design involves two social practices – collaboration with users and intra team collaboration forshared empathic understandings. This study is focused on the latter phenomenon, aiming to characterise a social mechanism underlying it. To achieve this objective, we used a framework of perspective-mixing in empathic design, including three distinct perspectives: first, second, and third-person perspectives. With this framework, we traced how team members share and integrate individuals’ user knowledge and insights to develop and apply their shared empathic understandings. We conducted conversation analysis to examine one design team’s conversations over a design journey from need-finding to initial ideation to prototyping and testing. To characterise this team’s perspective-mixing during their conversations, we analysed how team members took and combined the three perspectives within and between their utterances (perspective transitions). Our analysis revealed that the team used the third-person perspective as an underlying mechanism for perspective-mixing. In addition, the nature of perspective-mixing was distinct for specific design activities – the transitions involving the first and second-person perspectives were prominent during need-finding and initial ideation, while the third-person perspective was predominant during prototyping and testing. Based on these findings, we discuss what and how perspective-mixing can support intrateam collaboration for shared empathic understandings.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Being a professional: three perspectives on design thinking, acting, and being

  Swinburne Research Bank (Swinburne University of Technology) · 2024-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The purpose of this paper is to present three perspectives for interpreting design thinking: (1) an alternative framework on learning to become a professional, and (2) two interpretations of this framework that speak broadly to a topic of “design thinking”. The first perspective draws on a framework for “an embodied understanding of professional practice” that focuses on the ways professionals form and organize their knowledge and skills into a particular “professional-way-of-being”. The second and third perspectives provide examples of using this framework as a lens for interpreting existing results from phenomenographic studies on ways of experiencing design and ways of experiencing cross-disciplinary practice. We conclude with a discussion of how these three perspectives contribute to conceptualizing a working synthesis of design thinking.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A new direction for engineering education research: unique phenomenographic results that impact big picture understandings

  Swinburne Research Bank (Swinburne University of Technology) · 2024-01-01 · 9 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  As the pace of engineering keeps increasing, new innovations foci in engineering education research are needed. This paper presents one such innovation, away from looking at the skills engineers are to develop to focus on their embodied understanding of practice around aspects of professional practice. It does so through the use of a qualitative research approach known as phenomenography. The results of three a research projects guided by phenomenography are discussed and provide a unique lens for understanding aspects of the world that influence the practice of engineering, namely those of design across disciplines, sustainable design and cross-disciplinary practice. This paper summarizes the results from these three phenomenographic studies, emphasizing the implications these results reveal about the direction engineering education needs to head.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Work In Progress: Designing a Learning Coach’s Playbook

  2024-02-06

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Mr. Leidig is licensed as a

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Effect Algebras as Omega-categories

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2023-03-30

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  We show how an effect algebra $\mathcal{X}$ can be regarded as a category, where the morphisms $x \rightarrow y$ are the elements $f$ such that $x \leq f \leq y$. This gives an embedding $\mathbf{EA} \rightarrow \mathbf{Cat}$. The interval $[x,y]$ proves to be an effect algebra in its own right, so $\mathcal{X}$ is an $\mathbf{EA}$-enriched category. The construction can therefore be repeated, meaning that every effect algebra can be identified with a strict $ω$-category. We describe explicitly the strict $ω$-category structure for two classes of operators on a Hilbert space.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Exploring the Boundaries: Language, Roles and Structures in Cross-Disciplinary Design Teams

  2022-04-07 · 31 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In this chapter we characterise cross-disciplinary boundary work in an authentic engineering design situation in terms of language, roles, and structures. The analysis emerged inductively from participants’ words and actions. Five examples are provided to describe, firstly, different boundary work practices including the nature of boundaries, how boundaries emerged and how they were navigated; and secondly, different cross-disciplinary and disciplinary practices. Implications are discussed regarding social processes in design, the relationship between considerations of use and different cross-disciplinary practices, co-evolutionary and transformative processes in design, and facilitating cross-disciplinary practices and work environments.

  PublisherDOI

• Understanding Informed Design through Trade-Off Decisions With an Empirically-Based Protocol for Students and Design Educators

  Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER) · 2021-09-30 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access

  Trade-off decisions, which necessitate striking a balance between two or more desirable but competing features, are a crucial part of design practice. However, they are known to be difficult for student designers to make. While designers, educators, and researchers have numerous methods to assess the quality of design artifacts, these methods are not necessarily easy to use, nor do they indicate design competency. Moreover, they are not grounded in a definition of engineering design. The objectives of this study were twofold. First, we developed a protocol to depict design artifact quality through the lens of design trade-off decisions. We aimed to produce a protocol that:(1) encompasses multiple complementary and competing dimensions, (2) can be applied consistently and systematically, and (3) indicates design competency. We conceptualized a quantitative representation of the degree to which a design artifact addresses human, technical, and economic requirements called the Trade-off Value Protocol. Second, we tested the Trade-off Value Protocol by applying it to 398 middle school students’ design artifacts of energy-efficient homes. We used an etic approach of thematic analysis to identify the patterns of variation therein. We found five distinct patterns of variation in the set of student design artifacts, which suggested certain trends in the way that students address design dimensions and demonstrate varying levels of design competency. The Trade-off Value Protocol isolates an important feature of design competency with which beginning designers often struggle and could be a tool for educators to help students become more informed designers.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Challenge of Change in Engineering Education: Is it the Diffusion of Innovations or Transformative Learning?

  2020-09-04 · 17 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Development and dissemination perspectives based on diffusion of innovations theory are usually adopted as a change model for the broader adoption of evidence-based innovative educational practices. However efforts based on such perspectives have mostly not been successful in disseminating an educational innovation far and wide. We argue in this paper that the challenge of adopting and sustaining a new educational approach at a broader scale is an issue of the transformation of academics' beliefs and values. Transformative learning theory provides a framework for change that is more appropriate for the nature of educational change. We provide a comparative analysis of diffusion of innovations and transformative learning theories and describe the nature of the challenge of educational change from the perspective of both theories.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: Intentional serendipity, cognitive flexibility, and fluid identites: Cross-disciplinary ways of thinking, acting, and being in engineering

  NSF · $496k · 2008–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Lorraine Fleming

  88 shared

• Şenay Purzer

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  57 shared

• Ruth Streveler

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  55 shared

• Molly Goldstein

  University of Illinois System

  54 shared

• Junaid Siddiqui

  McMaster University

  44 shared

• Alison Dingwall

  Bridge University

  41 shared

• Cheryl Allendoerfer

  Shoreline Community College

  38 shared

• Cynthia J. Atman

  University of Washington

  37 shared

Education

• BS, Mechanical Engineering

  California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Awards & honors

• Neil Armstrong Distinguished Visiting Professors
• Purdue Engineering Distinguished Lecture Series
• Lillian Gilbreth Postdoctoral Fellowships at Purdue Engineer…
• Purdue-Technion Quantum Postdoctoral Fellowship