Investigating Engineering Students' Experiences of Self-Regulated Learning in Project-Based Learning Activities

Project-based Learning (PBL) has been widely adopted in engineering education considering its proved usefulness for improving students' multiple skills and their academic progress. Prior research suggested that participation in PBL could benefit students' development of self-regulated learning. Nevertheless, how self-regulated learning was demonstrated and improved in PBL activities, and the relationship between students' self-regulated learning and PBL activities both remain unclear. In this research, the goal was to understand what students' lived experiences of self-regulated learning are in PBL activities. Together, a group of twenty-one engineering students were recruited for one-on-one semi-structured interviews. They were from a first-year Introduction to Engineering course from a leading Chinese university. The course was structured around PBL activities. The interviews and the follow-up qualitative analyses were guided by a theoretical framework of self-regulated learning that consists of three dimensions, that is, Motivation/Emotion, Learning strategies and Learning Context. The qualitative analyses suggested that students' perception of project difficulty and project values, and students' self-efficacy can go through a dynamic change in PBL activities. Also, students demonstrated a variety of self-regulated learning strategies in this process. Moreover, students' motivations/emotions, specific learning strategies and their perceptions of learning context are closely associated and could affect each other in the PBL learning activities.