Page 108 - Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century

Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11338.html

THE ENGINEERING EDUCATION COALITIONS PROGRAM 91

tions among students or between students and faculty, which have been
demonstrated to increase retention.
Many of the above-mentioned innovative curricular efforts to pro-
mote nontraditional student outcomes did have these attributes: they
encouraged the development and institutionalization of first-year engi-
neering design courses, design courses in which student teams worked
on projects for external clients (both for-profit and nonprofit), and in-
tegrated curricula. More important, engineering faculty members were
actively engaged in the conceptualization, design, implementation, and,
in many cases, assessment of curricular reforms. Even though many of
these pilot initiatives demonstrated improvements in the retention rate
of underrepresented groups, institutional barriers and the absence of
the necessary assessment infrastructure limited their success.

Increasing the Number of Engineering Graduates

The outreach programs, success programs, and curricular reforms
initiated to increase the participation of underrepresented groups were
also used to increase the overall retention of engineering majors. Typi-
cally, if a student completes the first two years of an engineering pro-
gram, he or she will graduate with an engineering degree. Therefore,
efforts to improve retention have been focused on the first two years of
engineering programs, and faculty members have been actively engaged
in those initiatives.
Pilot curricular initiatives demonstrated an increase in the retention
of engineering majors, and many curricular pilots were used as the basis
for renewing curricula for all engineering students. However, institu-
tional barriers and the absence of an assessment infrastructure limited
the success of curricular reforms.

THE METHODOLOGY LENS

Based on the foregoing description of the expectations for the EEC
Program and the degree to which those expectations have been
achieved, we can turn now to a brief overview of the approaches used to
meet those expectations. Viewed through the methodology lens, we
can group the contributions of the EECs into six categories: active,
experiential learning environments; student teams; instructional tech-

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