Engineering Faculty Development: Getting the Sermon beyond the Choir.

Abstract

A reform movement has been active in higher education for several decades. The proponents of change argue that the traditional teacher-centered approach to classroom instruction, which emphasizes lecturing, individual effort, and competition for grades, is not particularly effective for promoting learning and skill development. They claim that a more balanced approach incorporating active, inductive (discovery), and cooperative learning improves the chances of achieving almost every conceivable educational objective, including depth of learning, length of information retention, development of problem-solving, communication, and teamwork skills, attitudes toward subjects and increased motivation to learn them, and self-confidence. They offer an impressive array of learning theory-based and classroom research results to support these claims.