Undergraduate Education

Restructuring Engineering Education: Why, How and When? By C. Judson King

C. Judson King
2011

There is strong interest in broadening engineering education, bringing in more liberal arts content as well as additional subjects such as economics, business and law, with which engineers now haveto be familiar. There are also cogent arguments for balancing against what is now the almost exclusively quantitative nature of the curriculum, adding more elements that relate to the actual practice of engineering, and structuring engineering education so as to provide multiple and later entry points, which should enable more informed career choices and make engineering attractive to a more...

Engineers Should Have a College Education, by C. Judson King

C. Judson King
2006

Many societal trends and needs call for engineers to broaden their outlooks, have more flexible career options, and work closely and effectively with persons of quite different backgrounds. Yet the education and general orientation of engineers have been directed inward toward the profession, rather than outward toward the rest of society and the world. Engineering education should change to create a broader outlook and understanding in graduates and thereby engender capabilities for linkages and more likelihood of advancement into management and/or movement into other areas. The...

What Do We Know About Students' Learning and How Do We Know It? By K. Patricia Cross

K. Patricia Cross
2005

The instruction that we provide, the intellectual climate that we create, and the policy decisions that we make should all start with the question, "But will it improve students' learning?" Basic to any answer is the state of our knowledge about learning. A spate of recent research has resulted in comprehensive and lengthy reviews of surveys of research on student learning; the current model for coping with this information explosion is ever-tighter syntheses and distillations. These "principles" could in turn be summarized as a grand meta-principle that might say something like this: “...