Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Página 528 de 957
problems, constraints, and learning goals were different in the PBL and PjBL. In the PBL
course, the instructor presented students with a set of common problems that were
designed to help students develop deep conceptual understanding in specific technical
areas. Students were expected to decide what they should know and what they would
need to learn in order to solve the problems. The PjBL course emphasized analytical
process over specific technical content. The attainment of common knowledge was not a
primary goal in this course, and students acquired different technical content depending
on their project topic. Student teams designed experiments, identified information
resources, and established their own goals, timelines, and strategies specific to the
projects they selected.
Convenience sampling was used to enlist students from those enrolled in the two courses
described above. Thirty-five undergraduate engineering students and two engineering
instructors from two private universities in the northeast region of the United States
agreed to participate. Complete data sets were available from twenty-six students. All
sixteen students in the chemical engineering course were junior chemical engineering
students (4 females, 12 males). Ten students (9 females, 1 male; 3 sophomores, 6 juniors,
and 1 senior) from the failure analysis course were in the following fields: mechanical
engineering (n = 3), electrical and computer engineering (n = 2), engineering (n = 1), and
undeclared (n = 4).
Quantitative data consisted of student responses to the Motivated Strategies for Learning
Questionnaire (MSLQ; Pintrich, Smith, Garcia, & McKeachie, 1991) and the Learning
Climate Questionnaire (LCQ; Deci & Ryan). Students completed on-line versions of the
MSLQ, a measure of motivational orientations and use of various learning strategies, at the
beginning and end of the semester, and the LCQ, a measure of perceived autonomy
support, at the end of the semester. Approximately twenty-six hours of transcribed audiotaped
samples of classroom discourse and student team work outside of class provide
context for interpreting student survey responses.
Data were analysed using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) to determine between-group
differences on subscales of the MSLQ. Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was used to
control for differences present at the beginning of the semester on the subscales, and
independent group t-tests were used in cases where the homogeneity of variance
assumption was violated. An independent group t-test was used to determine between
group differences on the LCQ. Dependent group t-tests were used to determine withingroup
changes on the MSLQ from the beginning of the semester to the end. Effect sizes are
reported as partial ή2 (interpreted as the amount of variance in the dependent variable
accounted for by the independent variable) for ANCOVA and Cohen’s d for t-tests
(interpreted as difference between the means with 0.2 and lower representing a small
effect, 0.3 to 0.7 a medium effect, and 0.8 and above as large).
Between-group differences were investigated to understand if students in the different
instructional environments reported differences in behaviours associated with selfregulation
and perceptions of instructor support for students’ developing autonomy.
Although the two pedagogies are quite similar in format, they use different degrees of illdefined
problems as the starting point for learning.
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011