Requirements for a System of Educational Engineering
Engineering in other disciplines proceeds through some general phases. Each phase requires specific skills from the engineer and specific tools. The first phase is invention where something new is created and played with until its value is demonstrated or it is abandoned. The new invention is very unreliable and often will only work for the inventor. The engineer must have the original idea and facility with the topic matter. In the next phase, general engineering, the engineer uses broad instruments to characterize his new invention and begin to optimize it. Perhaps the engineer looks at fuel efficiency and breakdown rate. The invention becomes better understood and more reliable. The general analysis will take the engineer only so far, eventually the engineer begins to notice that modifications that improve one system degrade the performance of another system. In the last phase, scientific engineering, the invention is completely modeled and understood. The engineer can then take the invention to the limits of its theoretical performance. Our test case for educational engineering, UPII, is at the end of the general engineering phase. Scientific engineering began summer 2004.
Why Reforms Fail
Most of us have experienced many educational reforms; from the drive to improve science education in the 60s to the recent concern about standardized test scores. Sadly, one finds that education has been little changed, if not actually degraded by these efforts. Reform fails for a few simple reasons; (1) The research that identifies the problem requiring reform does not place the problem in the context of what the educational system is actually doing. Classes do something. Students leave having some additional knowledge and skills. Without this context the reformer cannot tell if the problem is a local failure of coverage choices within a well functioning educational system requiring only minor tweaking for repair or a symptom of an educational system that does nothing well requiring systemic change of the entire educational system for repair. This causes educational reform efforts often to shift resources from topics the instructor is teaching well and has a high comfort level to topics where the instructor is uncomfortable, thus degrading the educational experience. (2) The suggested interventions, the reforms, are released for public use before they are competitive with the instructional methods they seek to replace. Traditional instruction is very cost effective, both in material resources and instructor time, and reliable (it produces a predictable result). It has a well trained base of practitioners who understand its presentation well. Students are also very comfortable with traditional instruction. Reform methods often require substantially different instructional styles requiring intensive retraining of working teachers. This retraining is often incomplete and ineffective. The reforms are often unstable, very sensitive to instructor changes, and producing widely different results at seemly similar institutions. The recent Hake study of physics education reform efforts show just this instability where PER institutions show conceptual gains of 60-70% but non-PER institutions see gains only of 40%. Within our classification of levels of engineering, current educational reforms are at the invention stage.