Restructuring STEM Curricula To Increase Student Retention: Lessons from the DEEP

Traditionally, efforts to improve STEM retention have had limited success, in part because they focus on ’fixing’ students rather than ’fixing‘ the curriculum. The objectives of the DEEP (Deconstructing Engineering Education Programs) project were to:

• reduce and reorder the prerequisite structure linking courses to offer greater flexibility for students.  Each course was dissected into topics at roughly the level of a line in a syllabus.  The list of topics was edited and prerequisites and successors to each topic were added.  Using a genetic algorithm optimized clusters of topics were generated to form a new curriculum. The new curriculum consists of 12 clusters, each of which could be a full year course and is quite different from the traditional curriculum.
• generate real life examples to better engage students in their learning and test their impact A series of applications-based lesson plans—covering concepts in solids, fluids, and design—were developed by DEEP team members and tested.  They were found to increase student interest and participation and, when used extensively, student grades.

 While the processes were tested over undergraduate education in mechanical engineering, they can be used in a variety of disciplines.

The DEEP team included:  Ilene Busch-Vishniac, Tom Kibler, Patricia B. Campbell, Eann Patterson, Darrell Guillaume, Jeffrey Jarosz, Constantin Chassapis , Ashley Emery, Glenn Ellis, Horace Whitworth, Susan Metz, Suzanne Brainard, Pradosh Ray, Kuei-Wu Tsai and Helen Ryaciotaki-Boussalis.