Curriculum nativeness – measures and impacts on the performance of engineering students

Abstract

In times of rapid transformation of society in general and domains of technology in particular, questions are raised on how to effectively organise higher engineering education. As a response, this study examines the curriculum composition of eleven engineering programs to investigate curriculum nativeness, a novel approach for assessing curriculum characteristics. In addition to forming the construct nativeness, this study establishes a way to measure curriculum nativeness by determining the number of credits originating from what is characterised as native courses. Native refers to the way curriculum content reflects the main subject classification, connecting the content of the profession with the content of the program curriculum. This measure is used in correlation analyses and other dependency studies to assess performance of the students during their first year, including total grade point and attrition. The measure of curriculum nativeness is also used to compare programs. The results indicate that the level of native content in a curriculum influences student performance comparable to that of other learning types that are known to promote student achievement. In addition, this study indicates that native content credits are more frequently earned than non-native credits.