Liberal Studies in Engineering - Workshop Report
Support for this event was provided by the National Science Foundation’s Improving Under- graduate STEM Education program (award no.1451399 made to MIT), by the Teagle Foundation, and by the Deans of MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and of Claremont Graduate University’s School of Educational Studies.
An Integrative Education in Engineering and the Liberal Arts: An Institutional Case Study
We describe the nearly 50-year history of a unique A.B. degree program in Engineering Studies. The program was created at Lafayette College in 1970 with the goal of producing graduates who could bridge the gap between engineering and the liberal arts; its current mission is to engage students in engineering as a liberal art, recognizing the increasingly complex challenges of sociotechnical systems and examining these systems through multi disciplinary perspectives. The program helps students gain expertise in examining the place of engineering and technology in society, with interdisciplinary skills to lead public technology debates around issues related to policy, management, economics, and the environment. In this paper, we describe the evolution of the program’s mission and curriculum in the context of higher education trends and societal and historical movements as well as some of the challenges faced by the program. Such a program may provide a useful case study in achieving the interdisciplinary, sociotechnical goals articulated by the NAE and others, and in broadening participation in engineering education. We consider both the transferability of our approach to other institutional contexts, and its sustainability in our own.
On the Cognitive Benefits of Cultural Experience: Exploring the Relationship between Studying Abroad and Creative Thinking
Summary 
Drawing from research that shows a positive relationship between multicultural experiences and creative cognition, the present study investigates creative thinking as a possible cognitive benefit gained from studying abroad. The domain generality and specificity of creative thinking is also explored. Undergraduate students completed a general measure and a culture specific measure of creative thinking. Performance on the two creative thinking tasks were compared between students who have studied abroad, students who are planning to study abroad, and students who have not and do not plan to study abroad. Results showed that students who studied abroad outperformed the two groups of students who did not study abroad on both the general and culture specific measures of creative thinking. Findings from this study provide evidence that studying abroad supports complex cognitive processes that underlie creative thinking in culture specific and domain general settings. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.