2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This poster paper details the goals, execution, and intended outcomes and deliverables for Year 2 of the project: “Greenway Institute of Elizabethtown College Center for Sustainability and Equity in Engineering.” This project has been funded by the Division of Engineering Education and Centers (Award #2219807) and was initiated due to calls to integrated hands-on learning, sustainability, and equity into the undergraduate engineering curriculum. In Year 1, the Greenway Center for Equity and Sustainability (GCES) ran a pilot semester focused on project-based mastery-assessed learning (Atwood et al., 2024). In Year 2, GCES is pivoting to a work-integrated learning model where students will spend 20-40 hours at a worksite with integrated engineering coursework. Initial data and outcomes have been collected for both the project-based learning and the work-integrated learning pilot semesters, in Year 1 and 2 respectively.

Specifically, this poster paper will focus on two studies to explore each pilot semester. Project 1 will explore the outcomes from the project-based learning pilot and compare the experiences with students who remained at the main campus location. Project 2 will focus on exploring the pivot to a work-integrated learning model for the Spring 2025 pilot. Our preliminary findings demonstrate that students valued the project-based learning and mastery-assessment approach. We also found that the opportunity to “earn while you learn” is attractive to students in signing up for the work-integrated pilot of the program and increased recruitment yield from Year 1 to Year 2. Furthermore, in addition to the pay, students valued the opportunity to engage in an engineering role that aligned with their coursework and career exploration. The initial findings and results for this work will support future iterations of the GCES and have implications for engineering education research and practice. While project-based learning and cooperative education programs have both been implemented and studied across engineering disciplines and programs, true work-integrated learning is less common in undergraduate engineering education in the United States. Based on this work, we recommend engineering education continue to move past traditional models of instruction and work, to consider innovative approaches such as work-integrated learning.