Student Engagement in Final Year Independent Project Work

Final Year Projects are a common component of many degree programmes and often contribute heavily to final award marks. In addition to providing students the opportunity to demonstrate the skills and knowledge they have developed during the course of their studies, final year projects also allow students to exercise a wider set of employability and professional skills. This means that in many disciplines projects are significant in the transformation of students into professionals. Despite the significance of Final Year Projects they have received very little attention in terms of student engagement. Student engagement with project work is critical given the independent nature of many final year projects. It is important that students not only appreciate and understand the technical or subject specific requirements of a given project but also appreciate the wider needs of a significant piece of independent work such as project management and control, objective setting and evaluation of both the outcomes of the project and the process undertaken to achieve this. In this paper we will review three types of student engagement, namely cognitive engagement, behavioural engagement and emotional engagement, with final year project work based on the three-part model of student engagement proposed by a number of authors . Based on this review and evidence gathered from monitoring the progress of an entire cohort of students we describe an approach for structuring final year project work without compromising the degree of independence required from the students or degrading the opportunity for them to progress on the transition from student to professional