Exploring Curriculum Flexibility and Compliance through the Use of a Metric for Curricular Progression

The Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) contains academic records for students at ten partner institutions comprising over 10% of the United States’ engineering students. The potential of MIDFIELD for curricular exploration is vast and has never been previously attempted. By using department graduation requirements for each ABET EAC-accredited MIDFIELD program and more than 400,000 engineering students, we construct a set of curricular checkpoints based on semester requirements being fully completed or not. While we discovered expected patterns within the construction of the metric, we also discovered indicators that engineering majors are vastly more flexible than previously thought. Almost 50% of students who graduated with degrees in engineering do not complete every course required by their major in their first, four semesters in the traditional manner. Furthermore, students not only enjoy flexibility in their early curricula but also enjoy through their later semesters where specialization courses dominate the curriculum. The aim of this research is to provide a new metric for describing the flexibility of engineering majors and further the discussion into how student progression through a major will require significant, future work. Introduction and Background The work of the MIDFIELD group has been widely disseminated and can be found on the MIDFIELD website. Previously, the project has focused extensively on important engineering education issues such as: the persistence of students in engineering disciplines; the success of women in engineering using quantitative and qualitative approaches; a better understanding of the “pipeline” of engineering; and other important topics. Throughout the history of MIDFIELD work, expanding into the realm of individual coursework has been sparse outside of using the database to examine certain “gatekeeper” courses, such as first year calculus and chemistry. The project team needed to develop a method to look at wide groups of courses and find a way to describe patterns of student progression (or lack thereof) that could be applied across institutions. The reasons for that mindset are: first, discussion of sets of curricula seemed a more natural progression from studying large-scale persistence and graduation trends; second, it is complementary to previous MIDFIELD work that spoke to many long-standing myths within and without the community of student progression and/or “success”; third, it addresses the complete lack of measurements of system-wide curricular flexibility within our community; and fourth, with more than 38,000 different course numbers on file for institutions within the database, the construction of a thorough, individual course metric for all MIDFIELD schools is better left as a topic of a thesis or major research grant. The need for more metrics of student success that address persistence or curricular momentum is clear. The engineering community of today has to grapple with an accreditation board who’s standards have been criticized as not being readily assessable. The papers consumed with calling for system-wide change that would address assessment issues have P ge 22687.3 traditionally been products of expansive efforts by larger institutional bodies. Although such papers could provide a suitable framework for the type of engineer institutions should produce, they have provided no definitive roadmap for the change they engender. The noted columns of the Engineer of 2020 are akin to the mandate of No Child Left Behind (NCLB): the report does not resound strongly across or unify the majority of engineering institutions in the United States or even internationally; the report provides no agreed-upon roadmap for discrete changes that are imperative; it comes with no system-building or capacity-changing funds; and finally, it is without apparent and feared consequence. The purpose of such a metric may instill a sense of wariness in the engineering education community and within the post-secondary community at large. Part of the issue lies in the current state of data policy and integration at the post-secondary level. Collaborative data integration among post-secondary institutions has been sparse, with projects such as the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) dwarfed by the results of K-12 systems such as the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). 11] The complete lack of a federal unit records system has been of much consternation within multiple communities. The engineering education community itself has been consumed with the word curriculum; however, searches into journal articles and papers containing the word yield treatises on individual courses, historical underpinnings of the engineering curriculum’s development, or case studies from schools whose revamped curriculum has engendered some sort of desirable change. We can examine the numerous calls for Project Based Learning (PBL) to be incorporated more closely into the engineering education curriculum or ponder the calls for curriculum reform that focus on reforming one class or sets of classes in chemical or civil or mechanical engineering, 20] or even the broader scope of calls to revamp curriculum as a whole. We could even wade through a sea of calls to reform simply on the topic of capstone design, which paint the research scene like a deluge over a range of years 26] The histories of engineering education themselves, whether reported by primary sources or modern sources, recount curriculum progressions usually from large-scale points of view. The progression of post-Civil War engineering education through the “Great War” era and beyond often as recorded in histories tell interesting stories of complete curriculum overhauls as prompted by necessity or immediacy or in response to some common theme.