A Case Study: How Collaborative PBL Affects Learning of Minority Students in Engineering Courses at Senior Level

This paper presents the current progress and preliminary findings of an NSF sponsored interdisciplinary research project that studies how collaborative PBL affects the self-efficacy of minority students in engineering. To achieve the project objectives, research activities are conducted collaboratively between an experienced engineering faculty and a learning scientist with substantial expertise on knowledge building communities and instructional system design. The first stage of the research is an empirical study performed in a pilot course (EE440) that employed CPBL to analyze its impact and develop a better understanding of the learning characteristic of minority students. This paper focuses on describing the research method and data analysis during the first stage. Preliminary findings identified critical factors in CPBL model that positively impacted the student learning process, and also indicated a few areas of improvement to enhance the effectiveness of the pedagogy. In the next research stage, the stage one study results will be applied to design a better instructional system based on the participatory design strategy.