Institutionalizing curriculum change: a SUCCEED case history

A freshman interdisciplinary laboratory class was recently adopted as a permanent course in the engineering curriculum at the University of Florida. This class is one of the projects developed under the Southeastern University and College Coalition for Engineering Education (SUCCEED). This class replaced the standard one-hour-per-week introductory freshman lecture. The class rotates 14 groups of 20 students each through weekly three-hour laboratory sessions in 11 engineering disciplines. Each discipline´s lab exposes the students to hands-on experiments representing concepts related to the discipline´s specialty. This paper discusses the efforts required to take an experimental course and make it a permanent one. Included are statistics which indicate that women experience significantly improved retention through the new course and minority retention is raised to the level of the general population