2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this research paper, we examine changes in first-year engineering students’ perceptions regarding: (1) their worldview, (2) the societal impact of engineering, (3) their engineering identity, and (4) their intent to persist in engineering, following their participation in a self-directed societal-context design project (Fall 2024) and then a structured technical project (Spring 2025) during a first-year engineering design course sequence. In the self-directed project, students were provided with an open-ended prompt which required them to both identify a population and the problem they wished to address for that population. In the structured project, the customer and the problem the students were required to solve was more clearly defined. While the students were still required during the second project to gather additional information to better understand the problem being addressed, more emphasis was placed on the development of the technical solution than understanding the context of the problem. These two courses (in the design course sequence) were designed and delivered using a Project-based learning (PBL) approach. PBL has been shown to enhance students’ cultural awareness and broaden their understanding of engineering beyond purely technical dimensions. Further, PBL also helps shape students’ perception of themselves as engineers and motivates them to persist in their engineering education. For this qualitative study, a random sample of 50 responses, 25 each from Fall and Spring semesters in a large Midwestern University in the US, were analyzed. Data were collected twice from the same population of approximately 1,300 students, in the form of end-of-semester graded reflections responding to four open-ended questions about changes in their perceptions across the four broader areas mentioned previously. Qualitative thematic analysis involving inductive and deductive coding, categorization, recategorization, and theming were conducted to identify patterns and insights in students’ reflections, capturing changes in their perceptions of worldview, the societal impact of engineering, engineering identity, and intent to persist in engineering. A large language model (LLM), GPT-OSS-20B, was used on a local server as a second coder, achieving 85% intercoder reliability with the researcher coder. Findings suggest that both types of projects helped study participants understand 1) how engineering practice can potentially help solve real world solutions 2) the importance of social responsibility, and 3) the importance of collaborative teamwork. The societal-context design project helped improve participant persistence in engineering education while the structure technical project helped improve engineering identity. We expect the findings from this research to not only inform us about the impacts of different contexts of PBL but also support improvements in first-year engineering design curriculum according to the necessary needs and expectations of students.