PBL AND LEARNING OF SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

When engineering students work in a problem based learning curriculum, they learn technical problem-solving as well as hopefully social responsibility. In the origins for the Danish problem oriented and project organised models, the development of social awareness was one of the main ideas (Illeris, 1974; Servant, 2016). The main purpose of this article is to analyze if there is a connection between problem- and project-based learning and the students’ development of social responsibility. The research project PROCEED-2-WORK and its predecessor PROCEED is a study of engineering students’ learning of engineering knowledge and competences. The project is a longitudinal survey study following a cohort of all Danish engineering students enrolled in 2010 and the students have been surveyed in 2010, 2011, 2015 and lastly in 2016 after most of them had been on the labor market for close to a year. In the survey, the students have assessed a number of parameters as their understanding of relevant engineering knowledge and relevant learning methodologies, as problem-based project work. In this article we will focus on the question if PBL facilitate learning of social responsibility? We will present results from two analyses: 1) Institutional comparison of the graduates from Aalborg University compared to the rest of the Danish engineering students of the 2015 data. The results show that there is no significant difference between AAU students and other Danish engineering students in regard to technical knowledge and professional methods but in the areas of society and environment, business and organisation, AAU engineering students all assess the variables significantly higher. So the combination of students’ design of problems for their projects seems to have an impact on their social responsibility, ethics and social awareness (Anette Kolmos & Holgaard, 2017; A. Kolmos & Koretke, 2016). Aalborg University has the highest degree of PBL in their studies compared to other Danish universities and there does not seem to be any lingering negative effects of the overrepresentation of non-academic backgrounds of the students of Aalborg University. 2) Institutional comparison of 2010, 2011 and 2015 data to analyze the progression throughout the study. The findings reveal that there are no major institutional differences in the beginning of the study, however in the end of the study before graduation, there is as significant difference and the students from Aalborg University seem to value social responsibility higher compared to the rest of the Danish engineering students, even if there are no explicit courses to explain this on the curriculum.