An Effective Framework for Enhancing Student Engagement and Performance in Final Year Projects

Abstract

Over the years, there have been many factors that have influenced the landscape of higher education within the UK. These factors include the rise in tuition fees, the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and the formation of Office for Students. Although student performance plays a vital part, another significantly influential key performance indicator that impacts these factors is student experience, which is influenced by positive or negative feedback and engagement. Despite student engagement forming a key part of the learning environment, it is still perceived as one of the weakest aspects when it comes to enhancing the student experience. In this paper, we present the implementation of an innovative, holistic teaching & learning framework for the final year project module trialed within the Department of Engineering and Computing at the University of East London. This project module had been running in different forms since the inception of the undergraduate programmes within the department, however it generally yielded poor and inconsistent evaluation, student experience and engagement. The framework was introduced during the academic year 2015/16, where its evaluation has shown a positive impact on student engagement, performance and experience, compared to the previous year.

An E-Collaboration Application for Final-Year Project Management

“…The system provides reporting functionality on student and grade statistics and an analytics data module to discover patterns that can be used to adjust and improve learning activities. The framework presented in (Naeem, U., Islam, S., & Siddiqui, A. (2019, April)) provides tools that support several activities such as supervisor selection, project assignment, and checking student progress through engagement checkpoints.…”

Improving Student Engagement and Performance in Computing Final Year Projects

“…The level of support (from the support staff and supervisors) can be adapted to satisfy the specific needs of every student, which is based on research, thinking, problemsolving, time management or subject-specific practical skills. This paper reports on the findings of two deployments of the framework, the first deployment was for the original framework [2] during the academic year 2015/16 (Implementation 1), and, the second deployment was with enhancements (Implementation 2) in 2016/17. The next four sub-sections detail the support structures, milestones and assessment built into the final year project module reflecting the enhanced framework and some practical implementation guidance.…”

“…This develops a sense of co-operation and belonging within the student, positively impacting student engagement [25]. In relation to this, the work in this paper proposes an extension to an existing framework designed to provide complete support for modules covering final year projects [2]. The main focus of this framework is to improve student engagement and overall student experience.…”

“…• Extend our existing framework [2] by introducing a final project proposal milestone and vetting, which enables early formative assessment, feedback and assured engagement. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose such a vetting process for FYPs.…”