Building Bridges in the First Two Years: Making Connections Among Introductory Mathematics, Science, and Engineering Courses

WPI和许多其他机构的研究已经确定了贯穿科学和工程教育前两年的一系列常见错误： 学生们认为，数学和科学入门课程彼此之间或与他们的职业目标、学术界和工作场所所必需的技能--沟通、解决问题， 小组工作、信息收集和综合-不是有意识地培养的。 WPI的各个学科已经开始通过同伴辅助合作学习，与个人课程相关的学术成功培训，课程内的开放式小组项目以及课程中计算和教学技术的整合来解决这些缺点。 这一举措将在这些成功的个人努力之间建立联系，并为数学，科学和工程教育提供独特的跨学科方法。 跨学科的连接将通过桥梁项目，鼓励学生进行跨学科界限的基本概念建立。 该计划将依赖于WPI的跨学科大学生同伴学习助理的发达社区。虽然WPI的创新项目导向的课程给我们的教师这项事业的特殊动机，这项工作的成果将是广泛适用的，因为它们将建立在一个熟悉的基础上，通常的学科为基础的入门课程。 在现有课程中提供教育和智力统一的增强和补充的结构可以一根一根地编织，而没有大规模重新设计课程和课程的风险或费用。

Studies at WPI and many other institutions have identified a common set of faults running through the first two years of science and engineering education: students see introductory mathematics and science courses as having little apparent relation to one another or to their professional goals, skills essential to academia and to the workplace--communication, problem solving, working in groups, information gathering and synthesis--are not consciously nurtured. Individual disciplines at WPI have begun to address these shortcomings through peer-assisted cooperative learning, academic success training tied to individual courses, open-ended group projects within courses, and integration of computational and instructional technology in courses. This initiative will create connections among these successful individual efforts and produce a unique interdisciplinary approach to mathematics, science and engineering education. Cross-disciplinary connections will be established via bridge projects that encourage students to carry basic concepts across disciplinary boundaries. The program will rely on WPI's well-developed community of interdisciplinary undergraduate Peer Learning Assistants. Although WPI's innovative project-oriented curriculum gives our faculty a special motivation for this undertaking, the outcomes of this work will be widely applicable because they will be built upon a familiar foundation, the usual discipline-based introductory courses. A fabric of enhancements and additions that provide educational and intellectual unity among existing courses can be woven thread by thread without the risk or expense of a wholesale re-fashioning of curricula and courses.