When the modern American University system was being created in the late
1800's (e.g., Harvard, U. Chicago, U. Michigan, Stanford), the goal was to
create the unification of the British focus on undergraduate education and
the German focus on the research university (Cuban, 1999). These goals
were not seen as being in contradiction, but in synergy. The goal was for
research to motivate and even inspire better learning and teaching. From
the beginning, the education of undergraduates was to be conducted under
the direct supervision and advisement of research-driven faculty members.
Larry Cuban's historical analysis of the first 100 years of Stanford
University describes how the curriculum altered from this original goal.
When Stanford started in the 1890's, each students' four year plan was
developed in negotiation with a faculty member, whom the student would
select during the freshman year. Departments then, as now, had autonomy
over what classes they offered. In individual weekly meetings, faculty
members would first help students create a four-year program, and then guide
the students through that program. Faculty were available to help explain
the program, or individual classes, so that the students could understand
how it all was meant to fit together.
However, the one-on-one advising model didn't work out well. From the
start, faculty members were driven by their research schedules, and student
advisement was often neglected. Administration tried both to force faculty
to meet at least one hour a week with each of their student advisees, and to
slough off the early undergraduate years to focus on more advanced students
(at Stanford, U. Chicago, and U. Michigan). But the Trustees and Regents
truly believed in the American University Ideal, so undergraduate education
remained a requirement of American Universities.
In 1916, Stanford shifted from the individualized program to a standard
curriculum, which required much less advising. The idea of the standardized
curriculum was that a set of courses could be selected for students that
would make sense and meet the students' general education needs. While
Cuban's history shows that Stanford often flirted with a more elective model,
the standardized curriculum model won out in all cases (Cuban, 1999).
While the trade-off between an elective curriculum with heavy faculty
advisement and a standardized curriculum may seem like a just compromise
towards the American University Ideal, the reality is that the standardized
curriculum comes at a high cost. Students do not actually understand why
they are taking the courses that they are taking (Donald, 1997). Over the
last thirty years, higher education students' goals have shifted such that
career concerns and financial well-being is more critical than broader
philosophical issues (Astin, Green & Kron, 1987; Williams & Schirali, 1991),
which implies that students goals may be in conflict with the general
education goals of standardized curricula (Donald, 1997). Donald has found
that one of the most successful educational reforms in higher education
has been to simply increase advising so that students understand why
they are taking the classes that they are taking.
From a cognitive perspective, we know that it is important for students
to see the connections between knowledge areas in order to transfer
knowledge between situations (Gick & Holyoak, 1987; King, 1991; Singley &
Anderson, 1989). Without seeing these connections, students develop "brittle
knowledge" where knowledge is understood only within a given context.
Students need to develop more general indices for their knowledge so that
appropriate knowledge can be brought to bear in novel situations
(Kolodner, 1993).
The first question is whether or not the current standardized curricula
work. Do students learn basic skills of mathematics and other domains and
then apply them successfully in later studies such as in engineering? The
research described in this paper suggests that they do not, that students are
unable to use knowledge from previous classes in their problem-solving.
The second question is, if the current curricula don't work, how might
they be improved. As Cuban points out, reforming higher education is a very
challenging endeavor that runs up against deeply-held beliefs for how
Universities are meant to be run. We propose a solution that does not directly
challenge existing University structures, but uses technology to facilitate
students' getting the information that they need in order to understand their
curricula.
In the following section, we describe the experiment we conducted to
explore integrative learning in the engineering curriculum of Georgia Tech.
We follow with the results of the experiment. We conclude with a section
detailing our current project to address these results.
