Forum papers are thought-provoking opinion pieces or essays founded in fact, sometimes containing speculation, on a civil engineering topic of general interest and relevance to the readership of the journal. The views expressed in this Forum article do not necessarily reflect the views of ASCE or the Editorial Board of the journal.

The discipline of water management offers important tools for solving important human and environmental problems, but its many diverse scenarios defy classification and lead to abstract treatment of problem types by different disciplines. The resulting generalized approaches to education may seem detached from reality or to lack academic rigor. Case studies offer a bridge between abstraction and specific approaches by providing context to the discussion of management principles. Changes in the use of case studies for water management education over the last two decades are reviewed to show how they address multiple scales and issues. Although cases are proliferating, their diversity and lack of standards inhibit their use for instruction in water management, which is itself a scattered discipline without consensus standards. Many cases are simply descriptions of dilemmas, situations, and ongoing projects of interest to the case writers. Most sources are not impartial but advocate specific agendas. Notwithstanding this situation, the cases offer rich stories about water management scenarios and lessons learned, and even imperfect cases can add life and experience to education and training. To facilitate their use, cases can be classified by variables such as scale and purposes addressed, but these classifiers are likely to be less useful than problem type itself. Steps to improve the use of cases in water management education and training include classifying them and creating problem archetypes for management education and possible further use within disciplines. Above all, the problem-centered approach offers hope that consensus about the long-sought paradigm of integrated water resources management might be facilitated.

Cooperative education (co-op) is a program in which participating students typically alternate between full-time study and paid full-time employment. Choosing to participate in a co-op program usually delays the student’s graduation by up to one year, but may increase the student’s job market prospects. This paper attempts to estimate the response of co-op participation to the engineering field-specific average wage for recent graduates. A relationship between wage growth, student ability, and co-op participation is investigated. Predictive modeling was performed using data obtained from the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD), as well as the American Association of Engineering Societies (AAES) Annual Report of Engineering Salaries. Semistructured interviews were conducted with industry co-op representatives to address supply and demand related questions. The authors found that a $10,000 real increase in the average initial wage causes a 5.4% decrease in co-op program participation. In addition, there is heterogeneity in the response by student ability.

Much funding has been dedicated to the development of research-based instructional strategies in an effort to improve the state of science and engineering education in the United States, but these efforts have not led to the desired level of dissemination and adoption among engineering faculty members. In order to better understand what is hindering the dissemination and adoption of research-based curricular components, more insight is needed into the curriculum planning and sharing processes of engineering educators. To that end, interviews were conducted with 24 transportation engineering instructors about their curriculum planning in order to better understand the decision-making process and to determine characteristics of curricular components that instructors implement in their classrooms. Specifically, this article examines what course components faculty change, why they change them, how they go about changing them, and what resources they utilize to make changes. Based on these findings, recommendations for curriculum materials developers and researchers are made.

Building construction education is crucial in ensuring university students are adequately knowledgeable and competent to meet industry demands. Attributable to the changeable and complex environment, traditional pedagogical methods in building construction courses cannot equip students with concrete experience and knowledge. Despite several studies, adapting information and communication technology (ICT) tools such as virtual reality (VR) to enhance construction education, limited interaction and low detail of virtual contents still remain an unsolved issue. To address this problem, this study proposes an interactive building anatomy modeling (IBAM) system, which allows students to conveniently interact with VR environment for experiential building construction education. The IBAM system is developed based on the medical anatomy concept, including intuitive features, which support detaching and attaching components; and dissecting which enhances student-model interaction. To identify the advantages and limitations of IBAM, a prototype was developed, and its applicability was verified through a case study. Interim results suggest that the system facilitates experiential learning and provides adequate levels of interaction to effectively transfer knowledge to learners.

This study seeks to identify the most suitable strategies to promote effective learning for construction management students and to boost instructors’ knowledge concerning the choice of appropriate strategies. Twenty-two instructional strategies, identified through a comprehensive literature review, were assessed based on students’ perceptions as determined by a questionnaire. Data from the returned valid questionnaires were examined and tested with exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and a structural equation model (SEM). The EFA extracted five strategies: web-enhanced instructional strategy, traditional learning instructional strategy, activity-based learning instructional strategy, relational learning instructional strategy, and student-centered learning instructional strategy. The results of the SEM show that student-centered strategies having the strongest standardized regression path coefficient of 0.93 were considered the most effective learning instructional strategies by the students. Based on the findings, institution administrators can channel the available resources to support strategies that are more effective than the others. Similarly, professors/teachers should adapt their teaching styles to strategies that are more effective and reconsider those with less effectiveness.

A growing consensus in the literature on how to improve the quality of learning suggests that adaptions to problem-based learning (PBL) methods could firstly improve learning experiences, problem solving, skill acquisition and a reasonable level of skill transfer from a student perspective, and secondly develop better professional competence and preparation in these needed highway capacity analysis skills. This paper describes the educational basis of problem-oriented and project-based learning (POPBL) approaches that have been developed as an integral part of a four-year undergraduate engineering degree program at the University of Delaware and incorporated into the transportation curriculum, using real world cases to teach students how to think like expert practitioners. A seven-phase POPBL conceptual framework and the experiences of employing POPBL are presented to demonstrate how it operates in transportation engineering education.

Transportation engineering curricula at the undergraduate and graduate levels are critical to the development of technical competency in future transportation engineering professionals—those who will be responsible for the planning, design, construction, operation, and maintenance of safe and efficient transportation systems. This paper provides an analytic review of journal articles and refereed conference papers addressing how transportation engineering curricula have changed over time. The literature review found 51 articles for analysis, with an increased frequency of those publications over time. Curriculum issues described in these papers include how transportation fits broadly within engineering programs and, more specifically, within civil engineering programs, which topics are addressed in transportation courses, and how these courses attend to stakeholder needs. This analytic review of the literature provides a resource for transportation engineering educators, administrators, and researchers to consider how transportation curricular issues have been treated in the literature historically as the community continues to develop and implement the transportation engineering curricula of the future. The findings will inform transportation engineering educators of the state of the practice in transportation engineering curricula.

Most construction management courses comprise only lectures on procurement and negotiation; therefore, students lack practical experience. In this study, an educational game was developed to help students make procurement and negotiation decisions for procuring the steel required for construction projects. An experiment comprising a lecture, pretest, negotiation game, and posttest was conducted at three different universities with a total of 87 student participants. The study not only analyzed the learning effectiveness resulting from the inclusion of games in a traditional lecture setting, but also quantitatively examined the problems related to the strategies used by the players from different perspectives. The results revealed that the game increased the average test score by at least 20.16%, and a strong correlation was observed between the winners of the game and the students with high test scores. The strategies used by the winners were different from those used by the nonwinners. Compared with the nonwinners, the winners considered different factors that contributed to winning and were more conscious of the strategies they used during the game.

The ASCE Body of Knowledge and the ABET Engineering Accreditation Commission have emphasized a broad set of competencies required by 21st century civil engineers. In addition to competencies that are traditionally technical, these organizations recognize that professional competencies such as leadership, the ability to design sustainable systems, effective communication, and interdisciplinary teamwork are among the many skills required by engineers of the future. To develop and enhance all of these proficiencies within the undergraduate curriculum, there is a need to take an approach that interconnects all of these outcomes throughout the curriculum, or a “networked” approach. This paper discusses service learning as a potential approach for facilitating the broad set of foundational, technical, and professional learning outcomes cited by ASCE and ABET, by investigating two case studies within the Engineering Projects in Community Service program at Purdue University. The case studies are two service-learning projects from one large, multidisciplinary, vertically integrated student design team. One project focuses on sustainable and energy efficient housing for Habitat for Humanity (HFH) in Indiana, whereas the other project focuses on affordable houses for HFH in Haiti. The current analysis of these cases suggest that service-learning projects can provide a unique learning experience for the students to develop and synthesize the broad set of foundational, technical, and professional skills by integrating learning outcomes.

The design process has been successfully infused in the civil engineering curriculum at an undergraduate institution through progressive and consistent integration of key design principles throughout the four years of education. This has been accomplished without adding new courses to the curriculum. Students are introduced to a problem-solving framework in the freshman year that is used as the basis of further instruction in the design process in subsequent courses. Several upper-level courses were structured to include project-enhanced, project-based learning and cooperative learning that promote learning at higher levels. Assessment data indicate that students are making progressive improvement in problem-solving abilities, performing better on senior capstone design projects, and show better preparedness to make the transition to practice engineering after graduation.

The National Academy of Engineering has called for the reinvention of engineering education by exposing students to the iterative process of designing, predicting performance, building, and testing; incorporating research into engineering education; and introducing interdisciplinary learning in the undergraduate environment. Here we describe a novel effort to integrate an undergraduate research project into the problem-based design environment of a second-year introduction to engineering design course at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, providing a design and research experience early in the curriculum. The project-based environment allows students to learn technical communication (technical writing and oral presentations) and teamwork (including conflict management and team coordination) in parallel. Approximately 600 sophomores from different science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines take the course, working in multidisciplinary teams to address a complex challenge facing modern society. We describe a pedagogical approach that involves designing, building, and testing a microbial fuel cell over the course of a 15-week semester. We also show that the course addresses eight different outcomes required by ABET. The benefits of incorporating research into a design course include high student engagement, while creating opportunities for students to participate in professional meetings, compete in regional and national competitions, and contribute to the peer-reviewed literature.

Introductory transportation engineering (TE) courses are crucial for developing students’ interest in TE and for creating a professional knowledge foundation. However, effective learning requires certain conditions. Students’ preconceptions are instrumental to the learning process, and ignoring preconceptions can result in the creation of knowledge gaps and negative effects on learning. The previous research did not focus on students’ preconceptions in the introductory TE courses. Consequently, the purpose of this case study was the assessment of students’ preconceptions in the introductory TE course at Virginia Tech. The research methodology was based on a precourse survey and concept maps, including the development of a transferable coding method. Qualitative data were used to assess how students integrate, organize, and relate concepts using their previous knowledge. Results indicate that variation of students’ preconceptions exists based on their major and year, along with specific positive, negative, or incomplete concepts. Additionally, the analysis indicates an increase in concept consistency and convergence in concepts based on students’ previous knowledge. Conclusively, awareness of students’ preconceptions is necessary for developing new approaches that could improve the learning environment.