Implementing the NEET ways of thinking at MIT and assessing their efficacy

Abstract

Industrial and societal needs for engineering education have transformed in the past decades while traditional undergraduate engineering education has remained largely unchanged. In Fall 2016, the Dean, School of Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) chartered the New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program with the aim of educating engineers to design and build the 'new machines and systems that will address major societal needs and challenges of the 21 century. NEET alumni will be prepared to work as entrepreneurs, innovators, makers, and discoverers, through learning and practicing the NEET Ways of Thinking: cognitive approaches that help students think, plan, and learn more effectively and efficiently on their own and within teams. Student enrollment in the program steadily increased from 28 in Fall 2017, through 52 in Fall 2018, to 83 in Fall 2019, making the program significantly larger than most new academic programs in the past, and larger than many majors. Starting in Fall 2018, NEET began to pilot the Ways of Thinking (WoT) through cross-school initiatives at MIT, where faculty and colleagues in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and the School of Architecture + Planning began leading efforts jointly with engineering faculty to develop short modules. There were 25 such modules implemented starting Fall 2018, Spring 2019 and Fall 2019, specifically in Ethics, Creative Thinking, Critical Thinking, and Self-learning. We describe how those modules were developed and piloted, how their efficacy was assessed, what were the lessons learned from their implementation, and implications for the future. One of the key findings is that the Ways of Thinking should be more integrated into the students' project work in NEET. We conclude by describing our plans for further integration of the Ways of Thinking into NEET, including their rigorous assessment to optimally inform academic program design. st