Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | L | Liberal Education

Transforming undergraduate programs in science, technology, engineering, & mathematics: looking back and looking ahead.

Article Excerpt
ARE NEW APPROACHES to transforming undergraduate learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) making a difference? If so, how? How do we know? And what next? These are the questions explored in a 1999 report from Project Kaleidoscope, which concluded by making predictions and recommendations for the coming decade (Rothman and Narum 1999). Now that that "coming decade" is here, it is timely to ask how accurate those preidctions were and to offer some new recommendations for the next decade.

The predictions made in 1999 addressed a broad range of issues, from faculty to facilities and more. In each of the scenarios for the future that were developed then, the underlying theme was that attention to learning and assessment would be pervasive in the undergraduate STEM learning environment on campuses across the country. One reason we thought this would be the case had to do with the anticipated impact of How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School, a seminal report published that year by the National Research Council. The report called for the development of academic cultures where deep understanding about how students learn determines how courses and curricula are planned, technologies selected, spaces designed, and faculty recognized and rewarded. Further, it was a report that could be used as a resource for shaping and sustaining such cultures.

There were several other compelling reasons for basing our future scenarios upon the expected emergence a new kind of learning culture. In 1999, there was growing external pressure--from public agencies, accrediting agencies, funding agencies, and the business community--for greater transparency with regard to student learning outcomes. New accreditation practices for engineering education programs were challenging that community of professionals, and many other STEM communities were giving new or renewed attention to student learning outcomes in their specific disciplines. Moreover, the National Survey of Student Engagement was piloted in 1999.

Equally important was the increasing visibility and maturity of the work of pedagogical pioneers--agents of change whose efforts had been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) since the late 1980s. Their experiences and expertise were beginning to inform a generation of what dissemination literature calls "early adapters." There was a growing body of research-based theory and practice about what works in the iterative cycle of exploring, examining, addressing, and assessing under-graduate student learning goals.

So, where are we today? Where and when are conversations about students and student learning taking place within institutions or scholarly communities? How widespread among STEM faculty and their administrative colleagues is awareness of the work of pedagogical pioneers and of the growing body of research on learning and cognitive science? Is it now possible to articulate a general set of goals for student learning in STEM fields on which local efforts can be built and against which they can be compared? And if so, what recommendations can be made for the next decade?

Current conversations covering the range of issues related to student learning are dramatically different from those of a decade ago. There is a growing national consensus about what students should know and be able to do as...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!