Page 52 - 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

GUIDEPOSTS TO THE FUTURE 35

RELATED EFFORTS
A fortuitous leverage point for realizing our goals to reengineer un-
dergraduate engineering by 2020 is that the engineering community
can learn from the experiences of individuals and institutions working
to transform undergraduate programs, within and beyond STEM (sci-
ence, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Leaders in other sec-
tors, professions, and disciplines are similarly examining societal and
educational trends that affect learning in their fields. The undergradu-
ate physics community, for one, has worked for decades to establish
goals for student learning and to develop inventories that monitor
progress toward realizing those goals in individual classes, programs,
and departments. So, collaborations within a campus—across disci-
1
plinary boundaries, engaging pedagogical pioneers—extend opportuni-
ties for sharing best practices beyond the community of engineering
educators, for learning what works, for example, in building interdisci-
plinary teams, in serving students from groups currently underrepre-
sented in the study and practice of STEM fields, and in bringing real-
world concerns into a discovery-based learning environment.
STEM fields are all dealing with the same trends that are redefining
the undergraduate learning environment, including:

• the awareness that exposure to science, mathematics, technol-
ogy, and engineering during their undergraduate career is good
preparation for a “wide variety of societal roles; and that the
nation will depend increasingly on a citizenry with a solid base
of scientific and technical understanding” (Center for Science,
Mathematics, and Engineering Education, 1996, p. 4);
• the momentum toward integrating research and education so
that all students have access to discovery-based, problem-solv-
ing learning experiences;

1 The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) is described by Hestenes et al. (1992) as the set of
six Newtonian force concepts that leads to an accurate understanding of force and motion.
The FCI explores student conceptual understanding of kinematics, the first, second, and
third laws of motion, the superposition principle, and kinds of force by providing questions
with a single Newtonian-based answer along with “commonsense” misconceptions that serve
as powerful distracters.

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