2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Motivation
This Complete Research Paper continues to uncover additional layers of impact that first-year African engineering students may experience in an Introduction to Engineering course. At Ashesi University in Ghana, first-year students are introduced to project-based learning (PBL), which sharply contrasts with the rote-learning pedagogies many were accustomed to in high school. Rote learning in education has produced African engineering graduates who excel in theory but lack practical skills, leaving them unprepared for industry. Research in various contexts has shown a correlation between ethnicity and engineering identity (Asghar et al., 2025; Yeo et al., 2024). The lack of a well-defined engineering identity among students significantly contributes to the alarming attrition rates observed in engineering programs at African universities (Wyk, 2020). This phenomenon highlights the need to further explore the broader implications of PBL in the African context. While existing research has primarily focused on the effects of PBL on self-efficacy (Beem, 2021) and self-determination (Ampomah & Beem, 2024), it will be useful to understand the extent to which this pedagogy may hold deeper impacts on African students’ perceptions of identity within their context.

Brief Background
At Ashesi University in Ghana, students in the Intro to Engineering course engage in a series of skills-building labs and culminate the course with a final project that requires them to work in teams to build an engineering solution to a local challenge. In this year’s cohort, they were tasked with designing, building, and automating a small-scale elevator. Previous studies on this population have sought to uncover the impact of this pedagogy, discovering marked effects on these students’ self-efficacy (Beem, 2021) and self-determination (Ampomah & Beem, 2024). However, the author team determined that these two constructs may not capture the full impact in their students’ context. The author team interviewed some students to determine which aspects they themselves identified as impactful in the course. The insights from this interview informed the development of a survey (Beem et al., 2023) with four constructs: three existing constructs from the literature (Cumming et al., 2015; Gok, 2012) and one author-developed construct. This study sought to quantitatively assess the extent to which each of these constructs may have indeed been descriptive of the entire course population’s experience.

Methods
A pre-post retrospective survey was administered to the 2025 cohort of an introductory first-year engineering course at Ashesi University, a small pan-African university in Ghana. The survey employed Likert scales to measure changes in students' self-perception regarding the following constructs: Groupwork skills (GW), Interpersonal Skills (IS), Problem-solving skills (PS), and Potential in Africa/self (PIA). Quantitative analysis, specifically an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and a paired t-test, was employed to assess the internal consistency of the responses (N = 85) and to ascertain differences between the two datasets.

Results
A survey-level exploratory factor analysis (EFA) yielded a Cronbach’s alpha value of 0.921. At the construct level, all Cronbach’s alpha values exceeded the acceptable threshold (α > 0.7). A paired t-test on the 85 responses revealed strong internal consistency within the dataset. The quantitative results for the author-developed Potential in Africa/Self (PIA) construct yielded a p-value of 4.853E-11 and a Hedge's g value of 0.275, which translates to a small effect size on the Hedges g interpretation scale [9-10]. The other constructs studied, which are already well established in the literature, also showed significant increases. The constructs of Groupwork Skills (GW) and Problem-Solving Skills (PS) showed a small effect size, with Hedge's g values of 0.0967 and 0.170, respectively. The Interpersonal Skills (IP) construct, however, produced a small-sized effect, with a Hedge’s g value of 0.169. These values indicate strong internal consistency for the constructs. A paired t-test on GW, PS, and IP resulted in p-values of 8.49E-05, 1.57E-02, and 9.73E-08, respectively. These p-values indicate high significance for these constructs, highlighting the robustness of the findings and warranting further investigation into the underlying factors contributing to these differences.

Through a PBL course, first-year African engineering students demonstrated statistically significant gains in both skills and self-perceptions within their context. This latter point, which has begun to be peeled back, is worth exploring further, as it may have broader implications for countering societal narratives about local engineering talent. Future work should leverage a qualitative approach to further explore this finding and uncover any nuances in articulating how PBL impacts African students’ perceptions of their potential to contribute to Africa through engineering.