Abstract:

Today’s college graduates face a professional future that requires constant upskilling and adeptness at learning, unlearning, and relearning skills necessary to be not only competitive, but also relevant in the job market. Current undergraduate curriculum is not designed to support rapidly increasing demand for upskilling. The current model for undergraduate education at public research universities in the United States is to first complete general education core requirements in areas such as Composition, Mathematics, American History, and the Sciences. This structure was established to model traditional liberal arts education. In their second, third, and fourth years, students move into disciplinary courses that fulfill requirements for their major area of study.

We are piloting an undergraduate curriculum redesign with approximately 100 first year students at a large urban public research university in the southeastern United States. This redesign centers on addressing several problems posed by a traditional approach. First, courses offered in the core are not typically well integrated with one another or to disciplinary major content. Second, learning experiences across the four years of an undergraduate degree do not necessarily represent or expose students to authentic real-world problems. Finally, students do not have a university-wide opportunity to exercise and demonstrate skills in the form of a capstone project. Instead, capstone options are most often siloed within departments or are only accessible to honors students. Such a curricular context works against needed efforts to develop interdisciplinary thinking skills, to facilitate independent problem-driven work, and to foster digital citizenship required to demonstrate outcomes of solving authentic problems and skill development along the way (e.g., through platforms such as Portfolium).

Beginning in Fall 2019, we are piloting an undergraduate curriculum that:
1. Engages students in project-based cooperative learning led by research faculty advisors from their first to their final semester;
2. Provides opportunities, throughout all four years, for experiential learning that connects students and the coursework they complete to their communities and the workforce;
3. Facilitates interdisciplinary thought, technology skills, innovation, and soft skills;
4. Connects students to outside partners in industry and the community; and
5. Enables students to create a transferable, living portfolio of experience, skills, and work.

We aim to produce adaptive, creative, tech literate graduates ready to solve the problems of and thrive in our city, state, nation, and world. A key component of the program’s success and sustainability will be a reflective focus on teaching practices and student learning outcomes, particularly those associated with career readiness. The proposed paper will present the beginning stages of systematic research during the pilot of the freshman year that will require, analyze, and respond to such reflection and describe student outcomes. We will report on a mixed methods study of cognition, affect, and metacognition associated with the program. Materials include a battery of surveys to be completed throughout the semester, a collection of archived student work, student and faculty interviews, and classroom observations. Student demographic data will be included in analysis as an individual-level covariate when appropriate.

Keywords:

Undergraduate, curriculum, project-based, interdisciplinary, collaboration, cognition, metacognition, 21st century skills, innovation, upskilling, workforce.