Ask the Expert

Professor Sheppard says: It happens all too often. A student in the second semester of her second year is cramming theories into her head for a midterm, and wondering yet again when, or if, she’ll ever put them to use. That’s a central challenge facing engineering education all across the country. Engineering, after all, is about actions that effect real change in the world. A new school of thought about what we teach undergraduate engineers would elevate professional practice and moderate the primacy that theory has been given in traditional academic engineering curricula. I believe this new approach would better prepare students for a productive engineering career, help them stay excited about studying engineering, and expose them to some of the ethical issues associated with real engineering work.

Recently I was part of a team assembled by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to study the state of undergraduate engineering education. After extensive research and observation, we published a report in December 2008, in which we concluded that the heavy emphasis on stuffing students with technical knowledge is, in a sense, outdated. Of course, engineers should gain technical depth, but not to the extent that it crowds out the opportunity to learn engineering in the real -- and really complex -- world. The solution we propose is not so much about increasing one kind of teaching at the expense of another, but integrating the two so that they reinforce each other and provide an education that makes sense before and after graduation.

We are long past the point at which we could possibly teach in four years —or students could possibly learn— all of the accumulated technical knowledge and theory of a discipline. Even if we jammed more credit hours into each semester and required more semesters before granting a degree, research shows that students wouldn’t retain a lot of what they were taught anyway.  We must set priorities within the technical curriculum, and the best criterion might be to focus on teaching what can be associated with professional use. Research shows that a typical student is more successful in retaining the theory that he expects to apply or has applied. A better integration of theory and practice therefore not only provides better professional preparation, but also improves the efficacy of theoretical instruction.

So what kinds of changes might make sense? One idea in practice at Rowan University in New Jersey is a class sequence that provides a design experience every semester. Younger students start with smaller challenges that relate back to the theory they have begun to learn. By the end of their undergraduate career they will have tackled more complex projects that correlate with the more advanced technical knowledge they have gained. All along the way, however, they have been grappling with the challenges of putting their ideas in practice. Another model, in practice at Kettering University, is to offer students “co-op” opportunities in which their regular academic semesters are interspersed with internships at companies. Yet another idea is to structure lab classes to more closely resemble the open-ended, less follow-the-recipe, problems faced in industry. At Stanford we have freshman and sophomore seminars, undergraduate research opportunities, in addition to expanded laboratories experiences that challenge students to think earlier and more often like engineering practitioners.

Curricular changes would improve student learning. From the faculty standpoint, however, the emphasis on professional practice would likely create a tension -- many engineering professors have never been practicing engineers. But there are several creative ways to infuse teaching with more professional experience. Boeing, for example, offers summer internships for faculty members to gain practical experience. Some universities also invite members of industry to come teach as “professors of practice” for fixed terms.

With more experiences in which students must figure out how to be engineers, they will gain exposure to questions they will see repeatedly in their careers after graduation: how do I accomplish this in a limited time? Where was my process efficient and where did I go astray? How does this product perform in real use? What is the ethical balance between quality and cost?

Maybe the most important question they encounter will be, “How can I acquire the new technical knowledge that I need to meet my current challenge?” If we give students the skills, experience, and motivation to ask and answer that question throughout their careers, we will give them much more guidance than if we try to fill them with all the technical knowledge we can think of while they are still undergraduates.