Key Competencies STEM Students Present in PBL Environments

Aalborg University uses a Problem Based Learning (PBL) paradigm in which students develop professional competencies by engaging with authentic problems throughout all levels of their degree (Askehave et al., 2015). All educations at the Faculty of Engineering and Science (ENG) and The Technical Faculty of IT and Design (TECH) at Aalborg University currently incorporate a PBL Competency profile as a compulsory exercise for all students in their 8th semester. These profiles are intended as a reflective exercise for the students; they are also intended to assist students in communicating their overall competence while searching for internships and graduate employment (Velmurugan & Friedrichsen, 2023) The profiles are structured around the AAU PBL Competency Framework. This framework contains a total of 48 individual competencies, grouped into four; meta-reflective, problem-oriented, interpersonal, and structural. Students are free to choose which of these competencies they incorporate in their profile. On average, students include between six and eight of these competencies. Allowing students to choose which competencies to include gives them flexibility in their reflections; however it also constrains the extent to which these profiles can be used to as evidence that all students are developing all of the competencies in the framework. The PBL competency profile has been in use for three years now; this study investigates the relative prevalence of different competencies in the profiles developed by students. A total of 1095 PBL Competency profiles were reviewed in this study across more than 50 STEM study programs, and each was evaluated for the presence or absence of each of the 48 competencies in the PBL competency framework. The analysis showed that there were substantial variations in the prevalence of different competencies in the students’ profiles. Some competencies were present in more than half of all profiles that were submitted; others were observed in fewer than 5% of student profiles. Significant to note was that the most prevalent competencies were those that tie closely to the active learning dimensions that are inhering in the Aalborg PBL paradigm, dealing with the problem-oriented competencies of defining and solving problems, and the interpersonal competencies of successful teamwork. Another observation is that the metareflective competencies scored low compared to the other three themes (problem-oriented, structural and interpersonal).