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The purpose of this NSF grantees poster is to disseminate initial findings on faculty perception of mastery-based assessment in a project-based engineering program as part of an NSF Broadening Participation award. It is understood that pedagogical approaches influence more than what students learn but also impact their mindsets, motivation, and how they see themselves as engineers. Mastery-based teaching has seen growing popularity in engineering education as faculty strive to support students in achieving learning outcomes linked with continuous improvement to promote performance and persistence. However, this teaching approach has specific challenges as it requires significant restructuring of assessment practices including assignments, exams, evaluation processes, and grading. This work seeks to better understand faculty perspectives of assessment within mastery-based teaching to support a user-oriented perspective that can help other engineering faculty navigate the challenges of using evidence-based teaching practices in their own classrooms. This paper focuses on qualitative findings from an initial pilot study from a larger, NSF-funded Broadening Participation project at a small, Eastern private college. This exploratory pilot study includes the perceptions of two engineering faculty members using mastery teaching and assessment in a project-based engineering program. A semi-structured interview with multiple open-ended questions was used to prompt participants to share their experiences with assessment in relation to their self-efficacy around teaching and their perceptions of assessment in relation to their students’ learning, confidence, and agency. Directed content and thematic analysis were used to identify codes and develop themes in relation to how participants described certain features of assessment in their engineering program. Preliminary results will illustrate features of mastery assessment that faculty highlighted as particularly challenging or successful and related lessons learned. The initial themes and patterns identified in this preliminary pilot study will be used to set up a more focused secondary full data collection phase in the larger study. Additionally, this poster serves as an opportunity to initiate important dialogue around the implementation of mastery-based assessment and project-based learning in engineering programs and to better support engineering faculty in incorporating elements of mastery-based teaching and assessment. 

The purpose of this work-in-progress research paper is to explore how mid-program engineering students perceive mastery-based assessment in a multidisciplinary, project-based engineering program. There have been calls in engineering education to support students beyond learning specific competencies but to also include curricular practices that help students see themselves as people who can do engineering. While it is understood that students’ mindsets and feelings of control over their own actions and outcomes are influential in how students see themselves as engineers, less is known about what specific classroom practices have this effect. Specifically, students experience assessment in relation to their learning throughout their engineering programs, but little is known about how their perceptions of these experiences impact their sense of agency or control over how and what they learn. This work explores how mastery-based learning and its associated assessment can be paired with a multidisciplinary project-based learning approach to influence students’ feelings of control and choice in their own engineering education. This paper focuses on qualitative findings from an initial pilot study for a larger, NSF-funded project at a small, Eastern private college. This exploratory pilot study includes the perceptions of four second-year engineering students enrolled in an undergraduate engineering program designed around integrated, multidisciplinary projects. A semi-structured interview with multiple open-ended questions was used to prompt participants to share their experiences with assessment in relation to their own learning, performance, confidence, and choices. Directed content and thematic analysis were used to identify codes and develop themes in relation to how participants described certain features of assessment in their engineering program. Preliminary results will illustrate students’ beliefs, learning, and perceptions of choice in relation to specific features of mastery-based assessment in a multidisciplinary project-based context. The initial themes and patterns identified in this preliminary pilot study will be used to set up a more focused secondary full data collection phase in the larger study and to initiate important conversation around the impacts of specific pedagogical choices on outcomes parallel to learning. By better understanding students’ perceptions of this pedagogical design, future classroom practices can be designed and oriented to support students in feeling agentic in their own engineering education and in becoming their version of an engineer.