2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background: It is often noted that students with intrinsic motivation for a specific topic or project put forth more effort to learn and understand that topic. Story driven learning (SDL) techniques have been used in engineering classrooms to help connect students both to their peers and to the course materials in ways that promote self-efficacy and overall learning. In a senior-level system dynamics course, students were asked to choose their own projects to model and analyze a real-world system. Even with this freedom, the instructor has noticed a general lack of self-efficacy—students’ personal belief in their own abilities- to model something useful and limited interest in the project beyond achieving a grade. In this work-in-progress study, students chose their own project groups and then completed a guided brainstorming activity which incorporated elements of story-telling, with the aim of increasing the emotional investment of the group members in successfully completing the project.

Purpose: Research Question 1: To what extent does allowing students to choose a system dynamics project based on personal/emotional connections to the project help them increase their self-efficacy in system dynamics? Research Question 2: To what extent does choosing their own emotionally invested project improve student competency based on project and over all grades?

Methodology/Approach: Students completed pre/post surveys to measure increase in self-efficacy. Additionally, anonymized project grades and final grades from previous semesters will be compared to Fall 2024 grades to explore any changes in student competency.

Findings/Conclusions: Preliminary results indicate that, in general, student self-efficacy increased after completing the project, but additions to the survey and/or other data collection need to be included in future semesters to help quantify the effects of SDL in the project.

Implications: It is possible that the small addition of story-telling elements
into the already established end-of-the-semester project may positively correlate with an increase in student self-efficacy and competency in system dynamics. If so, this may be a useful addition to other courses where instructors are seeking ways to modify existing projects instead of creating brand-new projects.