The Foundation Coalition [engineering education]

In its first year of NSF support the Foundation Coalition has accomplished its major initial goals of developing and beginning implementation of first year, i.e., freshman, “Foundation Curricula” at each coalition site. These curricula are characterized by integration, active learning, and enabling technologies utilized against a backdrop of continuous improvement through assessment, evaluation, and dissemination. The synergism produced by combinations of these four parallel thrusts has already been demonstrated to produce significantly improved student performance. All activities are designed to mesh with the coalition-wide action plan, which focuses on creating systemic and systematic change in engineering education by starting with the freshman programs and progressing through upper-division curricula over the five-year period 1993-1998. This collaborative approach in which all members focus on changing the same part of the undergraduate curriculum at the same time is a natural extension of the team-based management philosophy which characterizes the Foundation Coalition at all levels from individual classrooms to coalition-wide budget reviews