Integrated Engineering Curricula

Increasing emphasis on interdisciplinary research and education requires researchers and learners to build links between distinct disciplines. In engineering education, work on integrated curricula to help learners build connections between topics began with three programs in 1988. Integrated curricula have connections to a larger movement in higher education— learning communities, which help learners to build interdisciplinary links and social links within a community. Integrated engineering curricula have provided concrete assessment data on retention and student performance to augment research on learning communities. While innovators in both movements have offered many prototypes and gathered many data, goals and results from programs implemented to date are not sufficiently well defined to guide the design and implementation of programs at other institutions. This paper discusses the importance of integration, reviews accomplishments to date, draws conclusions by analyzing those accomplishments, and suggests future initiatives.