Materials Education: Front Page
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Undergraduate Materials Education 2010: Status and Recommendations
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By Lyle Schwartz
Posted on:
3/16/2010 12:00:00 AM...
Drawing on his 50 years of experience in the materials field in a variety of capacities, Lyle Schwartz, senior research scientist with the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Maryland, has prepared and published an extensive paper reviewing the status of undergraduate education in materials departments in U.S. engineering schools. He also offers specific recommendations for improvement. The introduction to this paper, published in the March 2010 issue of JOM, is excerpted below. You can read the complete work at this link.
Undergraduate engineering education necessarily evolves to ensure that a graduating engineer is adequately prepared to address most common problems that s/he will meet in the field. Recent studies by the National Academy of Sciences identify new instructional methodologies and offer new means for assessing engineering graduates' academic development. Will there be a systematic process for incorporating these and other new advances specifically into undergraduate materials education? What other challenges are affecting the nature and viability of the undergraduate materials education process and the educational readiness of graduates from this system of higher education?
Changing workforce needs are driving all engineering departments to add content on design, business, communication, and other non-technical areas, while the technical landscape is simultaneously expanding in each of these fields. In the four-year undergraduate curriculum, this new content is introduced at the expense of more traditional subjects, leading many engineering leaders to suggest that the professional engineering degree and certification be moved to the Master's level. While workforce needs continue in many traditional areas, faculty expertise evolves, driven largely by research opportunities that trend toward new, cutting-edge topics.
Limited local faculty expertise and limited curricular flexibility suggest the need for alternative approaches in education. In response, the way in which engineers are educated is changing. For example, there has been increased attention to continuing education opportunities for practicing engineers, addressing the need for content beyond that available in the four-year program. Additionally, advances in communications technology have opened up opportunities for distance learning, which could enable more depth in topical coverage for students in departments without local faculty expertise. The development of a workforce that has an appropriate background to quickly and effectively respond to pressing materials issues is critical to the economic and defense security of the United States. Materials—which are fundamental to any physical object—by their very scope encompass a broad field of study that naturally interacts with, utilizes, and has impact on many academic disciplines. In the sciences, the scope of the materials research agenda includes some fractions of the effort in chemistry, physics, and—increasingly—biology departments; in engineering the study and application of materials extends to almost every field, including chemical, civil, electrical, mechanical, bio- and aeronautical.
Many engineering schools include departments specifically dedicated to the study of materials. The education provided by a degree in materials prepares graduates for career options that include either industrial practice or advanced study leading to research. Traditional materials topics such as metals, ceramics, polymers, and electronic materials have now expanded further to include nanomaterials and biomaterials. As research areas broaden, some topics move from graduate to undergraduate curricula, displacing traditional subject matter and ensuring an undergraduate experience that is typically quite broad, but with little depth in any particular materials subject. At the same time, computational and communication tools have become available that are creating a new materials-design paradigm, opening new avenues for research and application, but requiring new educational experiences as well.
Organized into the University Materials Council (UMC), U.S. materials departments and their counterparts in Canada share best practices and generally agreed upon, broadly defined undergraduate curricula. When developing these curricula, it is important to consider not only what should be taught, but also who will teach it. These departments face several limitations in structuring a comprehensive undergraduate program including:
- Many smaller schools have a correspondingly smaller, materials-focused faculty, limiting the available range of technical expertise.
- As the materials field becomes more diverse, it becomes more difficult to employ more than one or two faculty members with a particular specialization.
- Research, usually sponsored by federal agencies, is intentionally targeted at "cutting-edge" new materials and processes. Departments, responding to research opportunities, replace retiring faculty knowledgeable about industrial materials usage with those focused on the potential funding opportunities, creating a mismatch between the undergraduate needs for background in mature technologies and the graduate-level research programs.
When materials education is provided in other, non-materials-based engineering departments, the process of educating students about materials can be inconsistent. At some schools that have a materials science and engineering department, that department has the responsibility for providing a basic materials education to non-materials undergraduate students. This is done by means of either a single course with many sections or through several courses, each tailored to some degree for the particular engineering specialty. At other undergraduate engineering schools, either because there is no separate department of materials, or because the other departments choose to do so, other engineering departments assume the responsibility for materials education. Topics and philosophy for materials education of other engineering students may be expected to vary quite widely from school to school.
In most engineering fields, the principal professional society (American Society of Civil Engineers [ASCE], American Society of Mechanical Engineers [ASME], Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers [IEEE], etc.) assumes the responsibility for pulling the community together and providing oversight over the educational enterprise. In the materials field, the breadth of topical coverage and historical patterns of professional society organization have led to no clear leadership by a single society. Issues of accreditation are addressed by a joint effort (TMS, The American Ceramic Society [ACerS], and the Materials Research Society [MRS]) but curricular content, methodology, and interaction with other engineering educational entities are left to the local departments and, to the degree the departments elect, the UMC.
National Academies studies of the MSE enterprise in both the 1970s and 1980s included the educational environment as one element of broad "decadal" studies. However, there has been no comprehensive materials study since the 1980s, nor has a focused study of materials education been made since that date by the Academies.
In short, the state of U.S. undergraduate materials education is relatively unknown, its implication for the future workforce is unclear, the responsibility for the enterprise is unfocused, and opportunities for improvement remain undefined and unaddressed.
In 2007, the National Academies National Materials Advisory Board (NMAB) began an effort to find federal agency support for a comprehensive study of undergraduate materials education. While considerable interest was expressed by leadership in various agencies, none could place this topic high enough on their agendas to fully fund it and attempts at joint funding have not yet succeeded. In the interim, activities by the professional societies to form collaborative coordinating committees, including one on undergraduate education, have moved me to take individual action.
This study presents my personal views on the issues identified above, focusing almost exclusively on the undergraduate experience of a materials student in an engineering school department, but extending to issues of continuing education and the master's level degrees. Much of the documentation assembled here is pulled from referenced publically available resources, but some original data gathering is also included. The opinions and recommendations are mine alone unless otherwise referenced. I have focused this paper on the background and information that I believe relevant to subsequent actions by the academic departments, the professional societies, and their coordinating bodies. Several areas of materials education are not covered in this paper.
I make brief mention of some of the wide array of informal and K–12 education and outreach efforts based on aspects of the materials field, but go into almost no detail. I have recently given some considerable attention to this topic in an address I presented at the recent Materials Science and Technology 2009 (MS&T'09) conference, and draw from that only a few examples.
I mention, but do not explore in any detail the materials education provided to undergraduates and post-graduates in the sciences, chemistry, physics, and biology. The enormous transitions in the research agendas of these fields over the last 50 years must certainly have induced profound changes on the education experiences of the newcomers. We must undoubtedly have much to learn from them about teaching content and methodology. However, these departments reside in schools of Arts and Sciences, are not therefore encumbered (or encouraged?) by the evolving engineering education revolution. Each of these fields also benefits from extensive networks of supportive professional society support for teaching at all academic levels.
I allude to, but do not discuss in any detail the path to the Ph.D. in materials within the engineering schools. Unencumbered by accreditation issues, the M.S. and Ph.D. education evolves within each department. Entering students at this level arrive with backgrounds including materials, other engineering, and all of the sciences, and degree requirements include some combination of self-study or course work to reach capability to pass a candidacy exam. However, graduate degrees with thesis at both the levels of M.S. and Ph.D. continue to be enormously sensitive to the local environment, the thesis advisor, the laboratory facilities, and the degree of collaborative, group effort involved in the study. Such local programs are not readily studied and certainly not by me, now 25 years away from university life.
I make no mention at all in the body of the paper of the important and parallel field of materials technology. Technology, the T in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), has evolved from the vocational technology of years ago into a mature and robust educational effort at high schools and beyond. Technicians and support personnel are sometimes trained on the job, but increasingly come to that job with two to four years of post-high-school education, often at a community college. ABET, the accrediting body for the engineering departments serves the same function for the technology departments in these various schools. The field of materials technology has evolved in parallel with that of MSE, uses overlapping sets of information and lab tools, demos, and experiments in teaching, and has become a major source of employees for many manufacturing corporations and fields. In the materials field, it is probably the American Welding Society that is most deeply involved in this level of education as it strives to supply the next generation of welders and welding machine technologists. To learn more about this important aspect of our broad field visit the web site managed for the National Science Foundation (NSF) by Edmonds Community College.
And finally, also missing from this study is the discussion of federal agency roles that would certainly have been included in an NMAB study. One very important point should be made, however. There continues to be a strong link between availability of funding for research and faculty selection in academic departments. As funding for research on large-scale structural materials such as metals, ceramics, and polymers has waned, replacements of faculty retirees have been made in the new, cutting-edge areas of soft materials and nanotechnology. This evolution in the research agenda is inevitable, but its consequences for undergraduate education need to be understood. I would have expected an NMAB study to explore these implications for federal funding decisions more fully than I do here.
In discussing undergraduate materials education in engineering schools, I begin by reviewing the historical development of today's array of materials departments and the progress toward a true MSE discipline. I then go on to explore the range of implications for the undergraduate curriculum that are incumbent upon these departments being situated in engineering schools, schools that are themselves undergoing great change as we enter the 21st century. Turning to the specifics of undergraduate curriculum I am able to draw on recent data compilations of others to give a reasonable picture of the developing commonality in "core" curricula in the MSE degrees that now constitute the majority of undergraduate materials degrees offered. I explore briefly the issues of continuing education demanded by an undergraduate curriculum that is increasingly broad, not deep, and then look (with some envy) at the extensive efforts to address these issues by our colleagues "across the pond" in the United Kingdom. The paper closes with recommendations targeted at the individual departments, their collective leadership in the UMC, the professional societies, and finally the newly formed Undergraduate Education Coordinating Committee (UECC), a joint committee of several of the leading materials societies.
My credentials for writing this paper include 50 years in the materials field in various capacities (See Appendix A) and an abiding interest in the subject of materials education. This paper is intended to address the issues discussed by the NMAB in preparation for a study, but clearly represents one person's perspective only.
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