Integrating knowledge across the engineering curriculum

Graduating engineers are expected to have obtained an understanding of their discipline by the time they graduate. Although the body of knowledge representing the discipline is actually an integrated whole, the students have learned these concepts, by necessity, in separate courses. The hope is that students will integrate the concepts learned in these separate courses into an integrated understanding of the discipline. If this integration does not happen, the result can be an impoverished understanding of the concepts and an inability to use concepts on demand. At the Center for Engineering Learning and Teaching, we are developing an innovative program to respond to these issues. The goal of the program is to help students (1) identify concepts of the discipline they are learning, (2) link these concepts into an integrated understanding of the discipline, (3) determine which concepts represent the core of the discipline, and (4) communicate this understanding to themselves and others. In a pilot version of the program to be completed in the fall of 1999, we will work with Civil and Environmental Engineering students as they develop concept maps and web pages to accomplish these goals. In this paper, we describe the theoretical and practical motivations for the program, identify the principles guiding the design of the program, and sketch out a possible implementation.