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friendship, continuous support, and enthusiasm. I also must acknowledge all faculty and staff in the Department of Civil Engineering for their support and collaboration. Especial thanks are extended to my friends for their friendship and kindness, especially to Dr. Maria F. Serrano, Rosa Santoni, and Katherine Torres. Also I would like to thank all Thai and Indian friends at the University of Texas at Arlington. I would like to express my very special thanks from the bottom of my hard to my mother, Zoraida Ruiz, for her great care, support and love. Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to my father, brothers, sister and nephew: Alvaro F., Alvaro A., Carlos F., Nancy, and Carlos A. for all their help, support and encouragement. Once again, I would like to thank all of them for their help and support. I have learned too much about friendship, the way to live, and especially how to treat people. This very last is even more valuable than any degree.

A capstone course is a culminating academic experience designed to encourage teamwork among students by applying their five years of classroom knowledge to solve realistic engineering problems. This emerging capstone experience demands academic and administrative changes to guarantee a satisfactory result within the time spared for this purpose. The main objective of this research is to assess students’ perception regarding the capstone project as a culminating academic experience, and to use the analysis results to propose academic and administrative changes required to support and guarantee the successful achievement of this type of final degree project. To reach this goal, an assessment instrument was prepared and applied to 47 students enrolled in a capstone course. The instrument allowed collecting information regarding problem-based learning experience, teamwork experience, and self-perception concerning students’ own behaviors and attitude during teamworking. On this regard, 87.2% of students considered capstone as a suitable final degree experience; however, it is challenging because it is known that student’s participation during teamworking is uncommon and usually just two students are committed. In spite of this, 86.2% of students considered that teamwork was satisfactory and 95.2% of them recognized that their self-behavior and attitude during teamworking was good. Based on the results we recommend to strengthen teamwork strategies among students, and to instruct teachers about assessment strategies to evaluate individual and teamwork performance of students. It is expected that these findings can help improve the capstone curriculum related to courses and their administration. These findings are also supposed to serve as a previous experience to those universities committed to include capstone as a culminating degree experience.

The civil engineering profession is challenged with rebuilding and maintaining a decaying infrastructure and addressing the ever-increasing problem of solid waste. These two issues are interrelated because of the reconstruction or rehabilitation of roads and highway pavements and because building generates an enormous amount of solid waste, which puts tremendous pressure on depleting landfill space. All these factors imply that recycling the waste aggregate from demolished pavements and buildings can have significant benefit for the environment and at the same time be an attractive option for highway construction, as a result of the savings in material acquisition and disposal costs. With that in mind, this research was undertaken to develop and characterize an alternative road surface material consisting of recycled crushed concrete aggregate, natural aggregates, and portland cement to achieve desirable mechanical characteristics. The study is aimed toward assessing the performance of the composite material that allows the saving of material costs by using recycled aggregate instead of expensive and often scarce virgin aggregates. The resulting material will perform at least as well as (and perhaps better than) the normally used composite material built with natural aggregates.

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