Sophomore unified core curriculum for engineering education (SUCCEEd) at Cal State LA

Abstract

The SUCCEEd program at California State University-Los Angles (Cal State LA) was designed within an integrated curriculum context to overcome the low success rate with respect to graduation and professional licensing, a common problem in engineering programs at minority serving institutions. The curriculum design has been driven by outcomes established to help Engineering majors acquire a strong foundation in core competencies; i.e., in: (1) analysis, (2) applications, (3) design and modeling, (4) communication, and (5) professionalism. The curriculum has also been designed to provide cohesiveness between the different courses in a given term so that students can focus on common topics from the perspective of each of the five competency-areas and see the interconnectedness of the material they are learning in all five classes. Although, the integrated curriculum approach was developed in the late-80s, it has not been widely adopted due to various obstacles at the individual, departmental, and institutional levels. Many of these obstacles are common to strategies that require major transformation in an engineering program. The manuscript reports on the programmatic and administrative challenges encountered at Cal State LA, and the strategies used to overcome them during the implementation of the integrated curriculum pilot program. The pilot study focused on integrating/contextualizing nine quarter units of lower division engineering courses (i.e.: statics, programming, matrix algebra, and computer-aided design). The paper concludes by reporting on preliminary assessment data.