(120f) Chemical Engineering Curriculum Redesign: Motivation, Method, Findings, and Implications

The undergraduate chemical engineering program at Texas A&M has faced changes on multiple fronts during the past decade. These changes were made in response to institutional growth plans that led to a significant increase in enrollment, alterations to our course offerings and sequencing, the adoption of a joint first-year program within the College of Engineering, shifts in student demographics, and changes in student competencies and attitudes as recruitment pipelines were expanded. Amidst this evolving landscape, our faculty engaged in numerous discussions regarding our curriculum, student education and performance, and the competencies necessary for graduates to succeed. In Spring 2020, the chemical engineering department began an undergraduate curriculum redesign effort in collaboration with the Center for Teaching Excellence at Texas A&M, following their Program (Re)Design (PRD) model. The process involved collecting feedback from over 400 stakeholders, including current and former students, faculty, employers, and colleagues at other institutions, to determine the knowledge and skills our graduates should possess. We then used these data to develop a comprehensive list of 47 knowledge and skill attributes, each with four assessment points in the curriculum (Introductory, Adequacy, Proficiency, Mastery). The resulting 188-entry table comprises our curriculum competency rubrics, providing a framework to assess these competencies across multiple courses in our curriculum to ensure connectivity. We also gathered faculty feedback at multiple stages and made refinements based on the input. Finally, we used the competency rubrics to generate a course map where each knowledge or skill is linked to one or more courses in our curriculum. Additional notable results from the redesign process include the design of two new courses, increased recitation hours and intentional integration of preferred computational software into the curriculum. The implications of these findings in this work will assist other chemical engineering programs in their curriculum redesign process.