Creating Effective Project-Based Courses: Personal Relevance and Its Relations to Successful Group Work

Group projects are expected in contemporary engineering curricula, and yet they often pose a challenge to students and instructors alike. Could making projects personally relevant help? The present study created and tested a conceptual framework regarding the impact of personal relevance on groupwork in a project-based learning (PBL) course. We examined how measures of personal relevance (PR), both at the course level (value, interest in specialisation) and specifically regarding projects (interest and investment in the project, and contribution to the project idea) relate to students' expectancy, group connectedness, team dynamics (effectiveness, conflict, satisfaction, interdependence, and cohesiveness), and perceived effort; whether PR differs based on students' gender, academic year, or time of the semester; and whether PR predicts students' project performance. Seventy-one undergraduates in a project-based computer science course at a large public US university completed surveys assessing these constructs at five timepoints during the semester. Our findings suggest PR is related to positive outcomes in PBL courses, with interest and investment predicting an increase in the project grade. Similarly, gender predicted project grade with female students having significantly higher scores overall, above and beyond other measures. We discuss implications for creating project-based courses in higher education engineering courses.