To Save Our Profession Higher Education in Construction Needs a Radical Change

People learn in different ways. Psychologists referred to these differences as cognitive styles that describe how people differ in cognitive traits such as perception or information processing. On the other hand, college study needs to be considered a profession in its own right requiring a large set of skills such as stress management, reading, writing, test taking, and metacognition. Research has shown that engineering attracts mostly students that learn best by regurgitation (55%) or theoretical study (22%). It is not surprising that teachers in engineering feel that they serve the students best with lectures and homework problems, preferred method of learning by 80% of the student population. Furthermore, an experiment at NCSU demonstrated that young engineers that don't fit the "lecture-and-quiz" mode leave engineering (a fact that has been observed at other universities too). Unfortunately those are the people who are highly creative problem-solvers, representatives of a group that our profession needs more of. The paper will present data collected over many years of research in engineering education which highlight the desperate need in radical change in the way the universities teaches its engineering students.