This complete evidence-based practice paper describes the effects of implementing a community-based learning project (also commonly referred to as service learning) on students’ perceptions of a first-year general engineering course. A partnership was formed with six staff members in the university’s facilities department who manage campus projects and other large-scale initiatives wherein each partner helped develop an authentic project theme related to their work for student teams to investigate throughout the Spring 2024 semester. This paper builds upon work described in a previous a work-in-progress that discussed the details of the project development and implementation process and analyzes the results of data collected during the semester to compare how students’ perceptions were affected by these types of projects.
The motivation for this study is driven by the overarching goal of providing an engaging and authentic experience for students as they begin their engineering studies. Instructors have found that, often, students struggle to appreciate the importance of non-technical learning outcomes in these courses, such as teamwork, project management, and effective technical communication skills. The prior study on which this paper is based investigated best practices and lessons learned with respect to planning and implementing service learning projects, finding a high degree of alignment between the course learning outcomes and the goals of community-based projects. This study provides insight into students’ reception of these projects by analyzing data collected during Spring 2024, when the projects were implemented, and comparing this to available information from prior classes where other types of projects were used.
We collected quantitative and qualitative data about student perceptions of their projects towards the end of the semester through surveys. Quantitative questions were aligned with the Course Acceptance Model (CAM) framework, which the prior study found to be well-situated for this study and intended to collect students’ views of the course across the four constructs of ease, usefulness, attitude, and future use. This instrument included questions that had been used to survey students in prior semesters to provide a comparative analysis of the results. In addition to these questions, students were prompted with several open-ended reflection questions. Responses from these were used to help better understand the results of the quantitative data analysis.
The results of this data analysis show that students responded positively to the projects and formed a deeper appreciation of the non-technical skills required to succeed in the field of engineering. The paper seeks to provide guidance to others who may be interested in implementing similar projects by discussing best practices and lessons learned throughout the implementation process in this class based on feedback from students and their project sponsors.
The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025