The Impact of Cutting-Edge Research-Based Final Year Engineering Individual Projects on Students' Learning

Abstract

Final year individual projects have always been the culmination of a student's curriculum at university, requiring knowledge and skills gained over the whole course. However, with time, their scope and aim have moved from a more traditional research-oriented one to a more modular structure, where specific skills are demonstrated and assessed. This work contributes to the understanding of the current role of research, cutting-edge research in particular, in final year individual projects in an engineering context: its importance, value and contribution to a student journey. The author collected qualitative and quantitative data through semi-structured interviews with academic project supervisors in an engineering context. Data has been coded and analysed, including by sentiment analysis techniques. Different and often clashing views on the matter have emerged. The role of cutting-edge research is overall seen as positive by supervisors with a slight preference for offering cutting-edge research-based projects, although generally it is seen as not essential. From a supervisor's perspective, students value the cutting-edge research aspect, as it improves the engagement and motivation of both the supervisor and the student, and endows them with some important skills for the workplace. It is finally proposed that cutting-edge research could be explicitly included in the project aims to reach marks at the outstanding level, while offering a wide range of final year projects with different levels of cutting-edge research character to allow to cater for students with different interests, skills and ambitions.