2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This full paper introduces PathwayAI, a gamified, web-based assessment platform designed to support students’ personal and professional development through sustained reflective practice and formative feedback. First-year engineering courses play a fundamental role in shaping students’ engagement, self-efficacy, and potential professional identities. However, assessment practices in these courses often prioritize technical performance, offering limited insight into students’ reflective growth, motivation, and sense of belonging in engineering.
Grounded in theories of reflective learning and formative assessment, PathwayAI integrates biweekly structured reflective prompts with low-stakes gamified elements, including progression indicators, personalized ability word clouds, and visualized growth dashboards. The platform is designed to translate abstract developmental outcomes, such as metacognitive awareness, confidence, and professional identity, into interpretable indicators for students, while providing instructors with aggregated analytics that highlight patterns in engagement and reflection. The conceptual design of PathwayAI emphasizes the role of students’ reflection and supportive learning environments in early professional identity formation instead of assessment.
This formative, exploratory study examines the implementation of PathwayAI in a first-year
engineering context through qualitative thematic analysis of student reflection data collected during a small pilot. The study is guided by two research questions: (1) how engagement with PathwayAI relates to students’ self-reported sense of self-efficacy and belonging in engineering, and (2) how students’ reflective writings demonstrate metacognitive awareness and personal growth over time.
Findings suggest that the gamified reflective pathway supported sustained engagement and encouraged deeper metacognitive reflection, with students frequently articulating increased awareness of learning strategies and professional identity development. This work contributes an early-stage, scalable model for integrating gamification, reflective assessment, and AI-supported learning analytics in engineering education, reframing assessment as a collaborative and reflective process rather than solely a performance measure.