UC Berkeley

The evolving engineering work environment requires engineers to have practical ingenuity, creativity, communication skills, high ethical standards, a strong sense of professionalism, leadership, business and management skills, in addition to technical engineering skills and knowledge. Surveys of new engineering graduate employers and recent engineering alumni both confirm these professional skills as the most important skills required for current engineering jobs. However, employers report a capability gap exists between expected competencies and the competencies of recent engineering graduates. Studies have shown that experiential learning opportunities, such as Project-Based Learning (PBL) and Project-Based Service-Learning (PBSL), promote the development of such professional skills. While PBSL opportunities integrated into undergraduate curriculum has been more widely investigated, the integration of PBSL opportunities in graduate education hasn’t been as extensively explored.

Engineering design pedagogy has increasingly integrated PBSL across the curriculum for its promise of greater engagement of students, transfer of desirable skills, and improved student retention and persistence in STEM. This research evaluates three years of a project-based engineering design course integrating a core PBSL element (social-impact driven projects), representing 70 participants and 17 projects. Using a mixed-methods qualitative approach to ascertain student motivation, goals, and perceived value at four junctures before, during, immediately after, and one to three years after the PBSL experience, this research investigates how student motivation for engaging in PBSL aligns with the actual perceived value that students derive from PBSL experiences. With a diverse student population (46% male, 54% female; 59% engineering, 41% non-engineering), and large graduate student population (76% graduate, 24% undergraduate), this study provided a unique comparison to the existing PBSL literature, which has predominately focused on undergraduate students to date.

Comparing students’ desired outcomes—motivations (n=70 course applications) and goals (n=209 goal statements)—to their self-reported achieved/valued outcomes—perceived value (n=68 reflections) and longitudinal perceived value (n=12 interviews—this research suggests that many students have a mismatch of value expectations from the course. More specifically, students are drawn to the social impact driven, project-based design course by the desire to solve problems but leave appreciating the process of design and problem solving. Approximately 88% of students reported the application/development of design skills/processes as a valued outcome of the course. The most cited design skills/processes were research, interviewing and data collection skills and problem framing and reframing, 60% and 54%, respectively. In post-course interviews, 100% of the 12 students interviewed referenced design skills/processes as a valuable outcome of the course.

Additionally, students valued gaining career clarity—confirmation of pre-existing career paths, identification of new career paths, or a realization that a potential career path isn’t of interest to pursue—all of which are valuable insights for students’ regarding their future goals. While most students did not indicate gaining career clarity as a motivation to enroll in the course (only 13% cited career clarity), 63% of students indicated gaining career clarity—clarity on the type of role, type of work/project, or type of organization/team—regarding their future professional goals as valuable outcome of the course at the conclusion of the semester. Specifically, 53% of students indicated gaining clarity on the type of work/project they would like to pursue, with most indicating a desire to work on social-impact driven projects in their future work.

Findings indicate that while students appear motivated to pursue PBSL experiences because of their desire to create positive impact, the sustained value they derive from PBSL experiences is primarily about design process understanding and career clarity. These results have important implications for how engineering educators present PBSL experiences to students, how they are positioned in a curriculum, and how they operate in conjunction with other efforts to promote retention and persistence in STEM.