Ledlow: The Foundation Coalition is not the only group of universities looking at [learning in engineering education]. At a national level, what is the push that is going on? What is that all about: to improve science, math, engineering, and technology education?

Evans: There are several things going on. One: U.S. students are not doing very well compared to other countries. We could argue about how far we are behind everybody else, but it turns out that our students really don't learn the things that we think we are teaching. So, there is a big movement, especially in science and mathematics education, to do what is called inquiry-based learning. This lets the student generate the question, become curious about things, let them deal with some topic before you do a lecture on it. Part of that is to get the students to work together and talk to one another. The teacher being then just a monitor of that-not the leader of it-to guide them through that discovery period and make sure that information is stored away in the correct way, so it is usable.

                             

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