Page 57 - 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

40 EDUCATING THE ENGINEER OF 2020

Retention
The ABET EC2000 criteria (ABET, 2005) and the Engineer of
2020 Phase I Report (NAE, 2004) reflect a desire to produce engineers
with technical competence and a broader array of “professional skills”
than the traditional curriculum seeks to develop. At the same time,
engineering educators and American industry have been working to
create systems that lead to improved retention of students and broader
participation of women and minorities. Fortunately, these goals are not
incompatible with one another, and institutions have experimented with
a variety of approaches to realign the traditional curriculum and to en-
hance student support mechanisms to meet them. Some notable ex-
amples are briefly described below.
Only 40 to 60 percent of entering engineering students persist to
an engineering degree, and women and minorities are at the low end of
that range. These retention rates represent an unacceptable systemic fail-
ure to support student learning in the field. (See Bennett Stewart’s com-
ments in Appendix B; also see Seymour and Hewitt, 1997.) To address
this issue, it is becoming increasingly recognized that it is important to
introduce engineering activities, including team-based design projects
and community service projects, early in the undergraduate experience
alongside basic science and math courses, so that students begin to de-
velop an understanding of the essence of engineering as early as pos-
sible. For example, the impact on retention of a First Year Engineering
Projects (FYEP) course was documented by Knight et al. (2003) of the
University of Colorado at Boulder and is summarized in Figure 4-1.
One of the earliest curricular interventions to introduce engineer-
ing activities at the beginning of the curriculum was led by Eli Fromm
of Drexel University. Working with a team that encompassed faculty
members from across the entire institution, the new college of engineer-
ing curriculum was “organized into four interwoven sequences replac-
ing and/or integrating material from 37 existing courses in the
university’s traditional lower division curriculum” (Fromm, 2002).
These vertically integrated sequences, which included substantial early
engineering laboratory experiences, resulted in improved retention
(21 percent increase) of students in the trial cohort and an even greater
increase in the rate of on-time graduation (50 percent increase). The
Drexel curricular approach was successfully replicated by the Gateway
Coalition members during the 1990s.

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