> home
> About
> Contact Us
> Editorial Info
> IEEE-USA

12.10

New Study Reveals Opportunities for Engineering Education

Are American engineering students prepared for entering the workforce? According to a new report, the answer isn't always yes. But the study also finds that U.S. schools are still producing top-notch engineers, and identifies several areas where we can improve how we get students ready for professional practice.

The report, Enabling Engineering Student Success, was prepared by the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE), a national higher-education research center funded by the National Science Foundation. More than 5,400 students at over 20 educational institutions were interviewed or surveyed for the report, as were educators and more than 100 newly hired graduates.

Identifying the Problem Areas

The study provides some strong insight into the problems facing students: they may lack important communication or professional skills; they are not being prepared to work in the multidisciplinary teams they will encounter in the workforce; and they are not learning to integrate problem solving or broader contexts into their design processes. The sum of these problems suggests that graduates do not enter the workplace with a firm understanding of what it means to be an engineer, or what the knowledge of what the first few years of their careers will hold for them.

But the report does not blame the education system for these gaps. Instead, the problem areas are indicative of a highly concentrated field of study which often requires more academic work and less extracurricular activities while having fewer opportunities to participate in internships or study abroad.

"We actually educate our engineers quite well considering the constraints," says Cindy Atman, director of CAEE and a professor at the University of Washington. "The engineers we graduate are doing a great job. But the challenge is that the situation they're graduating into is moving quickly, so they need skills we haven't traditionally taught them."

Meanwhile, more young students aren't entering engineering programs because they don't understand what it means to be an engineer. "Students are not necessarily seeing what it means to act like an engineer, or think like an engineer, until the latter half of their education," says Sheri Sheppard, lead investigator for the academic pathways component of the study and a professor at Stanford University. "As a result, some people might not be selecting engineering as an option."

Even the students who start studying engineering don't always stick with it, because they are not seeing the context of their studies. An example was a parent Atman recently met whose son had just transferred from engineering to physics because he thought (probably mistakenly) that it was a broader field. "We lost another voice," she says.

Making a Successful Engineering Student

The report identifies several qualities which make successful engineering students, including:

• Teamwork and communication skills

• Design confidence

• An identity as an engineer

• And an understanding of what engineers do

One of the first things educators can do to help students reach this level is to identify what factors brought them to engineering in the first place. In fact, the study found that one major factor influencing engineering students is the desire to do social good. "A lot of students enter engineering programs with their life goals already largely established," says Atman. "What we can do better is to help students realize early on how they as engineers can contribute to the social good."

Giving students more hands-on experience early in their education process is also of prime importance. "There's increasing acknowledgement that students need scaffolding, context, visual input and mathematics," says Sheppard. "Putting the experiential piece in early and then building into theory and math provides a good aspect for learning. Getting design into a student's experience is a way for them to experience the creativity and teamwork and hopefulness of engineering."

Of course, that isn't how most engineering professors were themselves trained, but Atman says that many faculty members are "receptive to using new learning techniques and processes. It's quite energizing how some faculty are concerned about how they can get a good conversation started with their students and use project-based learning."

What Comes Next?

Getting more students into engineering programs, and then preparing them for their careers, is a "community effort," says Sheppard. "Some of it is marketing: getting the real work of engineering and engineers out into the public view through parents or family so there is some sense of what students are committing to when they enter an engineering program."

Educators can also take the data from the CAEE study and adapt it to their own programs, or use it to ask the questions necessary to take their programs to the next level. "We feel strongly that we would like our research results to be put into use improving engineering education on campuses around the country," says Atman. "Therefore, in addition to our analyses, we included questions in the report that can be asked by engineering educators to evaluate the effectiveness of their own programs or approaches."

Some of the areas educators can investigate locally include students' awareness of engineering career options, their motivations and backgrounds, whether or not they consider global and cultural factors in their engineering designs, and what areas beyond math and science that students find to be important in engineering.

"We're hoping that conversations happen on campuses," says Atman. "This set of questions can spur a conversation, and that can help educators understand their local context."

For more information, local learning questions, and detailed data results, you can download a copy of the CAEE report here.

John R. Platt is a frequent contributor to Today's Engineer, Mother Nature Network and IEEE's The Institute. He writes the Extinction Countdown blog for Scientific American. http://www.johnrplatt.com

Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.