Assessment of Self-Regulated Learning in Service-Learning Project in a First-Year Seminar in Engineering Course

This Full Paper in the Research category examines the use of self-regulated learning in a service-learning project carried out as part of our First-Year Seminar in Engineering coursework. The service-learning project in this course requires that, under a specific project theme given, students complete an engineering project from inception and detailed design to implementation to meet identified community needs. A successful completion of the service-learning project is attributed to key aspects of self-regulated learning. Evaluated with a subset of the Engineering Design Metacognitive Questionnaire, our study shows that first-year engineering students' use of SRL is at a reasonable level and, compared to the results reported in the literature, not less than the use of SRL by engineering seniors assessed in two pilot studies with capstone design projects.