CHANGING TIMES AND PARADIGMS

Colleagues at a large public university I recently visited are doing some excellent research on first-year engineering students—what attracted them to engineering, how they view engineering as a curriculum and career, how they feel about their first-year courses (it isn’t pretty!), their confidence levels before and after those courses, and why the ones who drop out do so. I sat in on one of their weekly meetings, and one of them—an education professor—expressed bewilderment and dismay that with so much known about what makes teaching effective, engineering programs persist in using the same old ineffective methods. She wondered if there was any point in continuing research directed at improving a system this intransigent.