The Current State of Undergraduate Hydrology Courses in North America: A Path Forward

Abstract Supporting undergraduate education in hydrology is crucial to enhancing workforce development, research, and training necessary to advance the future of hydrologic science. Many professionals encounter the subject of hydrology in an undergraduate course that serves as an introduction to this discipline. However, there is limited synthesis regarding how educators design and teach introductory courses in hydrology. In this work, we analyzed 43 syllabi for undergraduate hydrology courses primarily from North America to identify how such approaches may vary and/or converge. We found that course titles varied widely, as do the use and titles of required or recommended textbooks. We also found variability in how instructors structured assessments, with 48% of syllabi reporting a distributed approach to grading rather than favoring a particular type of assessment. Instructors articulated 257 learning objectives spanning the range of Bloom's Taxonomy, as well as a small number of affective and skills‐based objectives. The majority of syllabi favored mid‐range objectives within Bloom's taxonomy (“understand” and “apply”), with fewer syllabi emphasizing objectives at lower (“remember”) and upper (“evaluate” and “create”) levels. In alignment with emphasis within the water cycle, most courses introduce key processes including precipitation, streamflow generation, groundwater, and evapotranspiration, but tended to diverge in whether they included topics such as climate change, human impacts on the water cycle, and water management. Overall, our synthesis provides a useful starting point for developing a common introductory curriculum in the field of hydrology, and considering what needs may still exist when first introducing undergraduate students to hydrologic science.