Enhancing bachelor students’ ownership in hands-on education: the case of mechanical engineering

Project introduction and background information

In order to further develop the OGO-projects into the direction of CBL by the department of mechanical engineering, it is important that students increase their ownership of learning process and learning outcomes. The need for this is based on experiences of teachers with ownership among their students in the current OGO-projects. They experience almost no increase in ownership among students over the years of the bachelor program. Despite the various attempts to make changes to this, for example, by carefully increasing the complexity of the projects (from less to more complex) and gradually deceasing support (fading), students in their second and third year hardly change towards more ownership when compared with first year students.

Objective and expected outcomes

• Getting a clear picture of how students’ ownership in hands-on education projects can be characterized and enhanced by specific measures regarding the implementation of (combinations of) basic learning needs and motives/drives for ownership.
• Connecting the patterns resulting from 1 with the regulation of learning activities by the teacher and students respectively.
• Getting a clear picture of how, when and under what conditions study regulation by the teacher can be gradually taken over by students during the consecutive years of the bachelor program
• Extra objective we aim at setting up an OGO project that pretends to be challenge-based right from the start for two groups of students.