Abstract
Modern engineers are increasingly called upon to hold multidisciplinary knowledge and skills to solve real-world problem and grand challenges. Consequently, both educators and researchers are striving to promoting multidisciplinary engineering education, and ABET accreditation standards also require students to gain an ability to function on multidisciplinary teams. Therefore, many practices and approaches related to multidisciplinary engineering education at program, curricular, and classroom levels have been tried to satisfy this need. However, little in the way of scholarly research has been carried out to provide an overall picture of such efforts in multidisciplinary engineering education. To address this gap, this systematic review of multidisciplinary engineering education aims to make current efforts and practices more visible and accessible, including by identifying accredited programs, different formats and approaches tried, and types of capstone design experiences. Three phases of review were conducted with emphasis on multidisciplinary programs, multidisciplinary approaches, and multidisciplinary capstone, separately. The results reveal an increasing trend in the development of multidisciplinary engineering programs, the significant role of capstone projects in facilitating multidisciplinary engineering education, including integrated and real-world trends in multidisciplinary capstone experiences. In addition, there are gaps in the literature that required more insights regarding non-accredited programs, student outcomes gained through multidisciplinary approaches, and further validation of multidisciplinary capstone projects.
Lina ZHENG got her Ph.D. degree in Public Administration from Tsinghua University, China. She was also a visiting scholar in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. Her research interests include international engineering education, interdisciplinary engineering education. Recently, she focused most on the "New Engineering" initiative launched in 2017 in China, as well as engineering education reforms globally.
Hu Dexin graduated from Institute of education, Tsinghua University in 2019 and received a doctorate in management. At present, he is an associate professor of School of education / Institute of new engineering education, Tianjin University. His main research directions are higher engineering education, education policy and evaluation, graduate education, etc.
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3056-5144
Purdue University at West Lafayette (COE)
[biography]
Dr. Brent K. Jesiek is Professor in the Schools of Engineering Education and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University.
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