Civil Engineering Students in the Final Year of Their Bachelor’s Degree: Evaluation of Group Project Work under a Retrospective Dimension

Abstract

A successful civil engineering project is often a highly collaborative team-based activity, and the engineering education community must therefore prepare graduates to work in this type of environment. A large body of research has demonstrated the considerable benefits and minor organizational problems of collaborative work in higher education. However, there are only a few case studies reported in the literature that evaluate the positive and negative experiences encountered by students when undertaking group projects, and these invariably focus on first-year students. This paper contributes to this limited literature by assessing previously existing methodologies applied to group projects in the final year of an engineering degree, and compares the results with those obtained for students with no experience in collaborative work. The methodology was tested on a survey sample of 105 students enrolled in the Roads module of the new Civil and Territorial Engineering degree at the Technical University of Madrid (UPM). Although the results highlight the extremely positive effects of group projects on the students’ perceptions, certain deficiencies were also detected relating to the lack of previous collaborative work in the students’ background, an area which requires further research.