Creating effective project-based courses: personal relevance and its relations to successful group work

ABSTRACT

Group projects are expected in contemporary engineering curricula, and yet they often pose a challenge to students and instructors alike. Could making projects personally relevant help? The present study created and tested a conceptual framework regarding the impact of personal relevance on groupwork in a project-based learning (PBL) course. We examined how measures of personal relevance (PR), both at the course level (value, interest in specialisation) and specifically regarding projects (interest and investment in the project, and contribution to the project idea) relate to students’ expectancy, group connectedness, team dynamics (effectiveness, conflict, satisfaction, interdependence, and cohesiveness), and perceived effort; whether PR differs based on students’ gender, academic year, or time of the semester; and whether PR predicts students’ project performance. Seventy-one undergraduates in a project-based computer science course at a large public US university completed surveys assessing these constructs at five timepoints during the semester. Our findings suggest PR is related to positive outcomes in PBL courses, with interest and investment predicting an increase in the project grade. Similarly, gender predicted project grade with female students having significantly higher scores overall, above and beyond other measures. We discuss implications for creating project-based courses in higher education engineering courses.

KEYWORDS:

• Personal relevance
• project-based learning
• motivation
• perceived effort
• group connectedness
• team dynamics

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Center for Teaching Excellence of the University of Virginia. We thank the students who participated to this research, as well as our colleagues: Lindsay Wheeler for her insightful guidance throughout all stages of this work, Stefen Beeler-Duden for his assistance with data collection, and Xi Wang for her contribution in the literature review of this paper. We also want to acknowledge the significant contribution of Charles Rushton and Stephanie Morton to the preliminary analysis in an earlier version of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Panagiotis Apostolellis

Panagiotis Apostolellis is a full-time Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Virginia. He received his PhD in Computer Science & Applications from Virginia Tech in 2017. He also holds a MSc in Computer Science from Virginia Tech (VT) and an MSc in Human-Centered Systems from the University of Sussex (UK). His research is focused on understanding the contributing factors to successful project-based engineering courses and improving computer science education. In the past, he worked as a Senior Interactive Designer and Developer at a cultural institution in his home country, Greece (2000–11), which informed his prior research on audience interaction with serious games and virtual environments in informal learning settings.

Jessica Taggart

Jessica Taggart, PhD, is a postdoctoral research associate in the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Virginia. Her current research explores effective teaching, learning, and curriculum development practices in higher education. She is especially interested in better understanding how leveraging active and collaborative learning techniques can improve student outcomes.

R. X. Schwartz

R. X. Schwartz is a student in the Graduate Cybersecurity Management Certificate at the University of Virginia, and a graduate of the UVA Bachelor's in Systems Engineering. He is a researcher in the areas of digital wellbeing and human–computer interaction.