2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In the Fall of 2023, an engineering program hosted the first cohort of undergraduate engineering students in a hands-on, mastery-based semester-away program. In the first pilot of the program, four students spent an entire semester at the Vermont campus where they spent their days engaging in projects and mastery-based learning. The goal of the program was to introduce students to equity and sustainability topics through an innovative approach. This paper qualitatively explores students’ perspectives one year after participating in the hands-on, mastery-assessed, and project-based learning intervention. The research questions were as follows:

1. How do students describe returning to the “traditional classroom” in Spring of 2024 after their participation in the program?
2. How do students describe their summer internship experience in Summer 2024 after their participation in the program?
3. How did students perceive learning across their experiences?

To answer the three research questions, we leveraged qualitative research methods. Specifically, we conducted semi-structured interviews with three previous program participants and used thematic analysis to analyze semi-structured interviews with three engineering undergraduate students who participated in the program during the 2023 fall semester. From our preliminary analysis, we found that all of the former participants strongly felt that the program influenced their approach to their coursework in the semester following the program. Those who engaged in internships during the following summer felt that they were able to apply their learning at work. Furthermore, the participants demonstrated self-directed learning skills and stated that they felt an increased motivation in their subsequent coursework.

The findings from this study will inform future iterations of the program and have implications for engineering education practitioners. The participants interviewed felt that project-based and mastery-based assessment were effective practices that supported their learning which could be leveraged by other engineering programs and institutions. These findings align with prior research demonstrating the effectiveness of mastery-based and project-based learning in the engineering classroom. Future work will compare the perspectives of students who participated in the intervention with students who did not participate in the intervention and remained at the “home” campus to continue to explore the influence of project-based, mastery-assessed learning in engineering.