What We Do or Don’t Learn in Indian Engineering Education?

Almost all undergraduate electrical engineering programs have a course in circuit theory, and most would cover Kirchoff’s Law and Wheatstone Bridge. Surely having obtained B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from one of the prestigious institutions in India I should be able to recall them. I was a fairly good student and received an A in most courses. Sadly I can’t even recall the electrical quantities they refer to.

It may just be me, but I suspect many of my classmates would share my amnesia. Nonetheless, most of us think of ourselves as fairly good engineers. One might ask if we cannot recall such foundational knowledge, did we learn anything in our undergraduate studies? I submit that this is the wrong question to ask. Specific knowledge that is taught and tested in undergraduate classes is eminently forgettable. What we need to ask is whether students gained sufficient confidence in their understanding of the core concepts to be able to relearn these topics when needed? Or whether an undergraduate program is simply a credentialing system to allow students to climb to the next ladder, often into management or consulting.

My classmates often give the facile answer that it is not what we were taught in classes, it is who we went to college with. There is more than a grain of truth in this. What we learned in those days that was useful was learnt frequently outside of classroom — in social activities of dorms and sports fields was how to learn. A good undergraduate program should develop skills like critical thinking, problem-solving, communications, and the self-confidence that one can learn new topics quickly. In my education, no one taught us these skills directly but somehow, in our search for good grades and interactions with peer students, we stumbled upon some of them. We figured out that Rajat was a great notetaker if he could simply wake up to go to class on time. So, we made sure he was woken up with a bracing cup of tea so he could take good notes for the whole wing. The rest of the clever strategies we came up with should not be broadcast in a public forum.

What we also instinctively knew as we tried to game our way to good grades was that learning for different students took place in different ways. What if the educational system recognized diverse paths to learning and used them to impart better education? I have recently found my way into a discipline known as the Science of Learning. The purpose of the Science of Learning is to summarize the existing research from cognitive science related to how students learn and connect this research to its practical implications for teaching and learning. Research has identified cognitive principles about how students learn new ideas, how knowledge is transferred from working memory to long-term memory, how structuring the knowledge helps to improve recall and transfer to novel problems in the future, what types of practice helps or does not help with learning new facts and what kinds of feedbacks is essential to acquiring knowledge and skills. In future posts in this blog, I will examine these various principles and their impact on teaching methods.

This is a unique moment in Indian higher education where the rapid expansion of technical colleges has generated concern about our ability to expand STEM education without diminishing the quality of training. This concern has deepened as COVID-19 has forced universities to explore alternative ways of imparting education at a distance. Undergraduate STEM education in India emerged in the wake of Independence and rising national aspiration to enter the scientific world. Elite institutions of technology, particularly the ITTs and IISC were modeled after similar institutions in the US and Europe. However, we modeled ourselves on elite Western institutions as they were in the 1905s. Since then, Indian institutions have expanded in number, but the core teaching philosophy, summarized as classroom and textbook oriented teaching, has remained unchanged while their aspirational peers in the West have continued to evolve using modern principles of pedagogy.

This blog is devoted to thinking about ways in which Indian STEM education can leapfrog the middle decades and adapt 21st Century science of learning to uniquely Indian conditions.