Conveying Instructor Expectations In A Project Centered Course

Instructor expectations of student behaviors in a teacher-centered course are different from the instructor expectations in a student-centered course. Many students successful in traditional lecture-based courses are frustrated and anxious when working on open-ended projects because they don’t understand what is expected of them. Faculty teaching courses with open-ended projects may be equally frustrated that their students do not seem to be correctly perceiving their expectations despite their repetitive efforts to convey these expectations. This study used both quantitative and qualitative methods to understand both sides the instructor’s expectations of students and the students’ perceptions of the instructor’s expectations -in an open-ended, studentcentered classroom. Four students and the instructor were interviewed throughout an upperdivision undergraduate mechanical engineering course. This paper describes the research methods and preliminary results from this study. With the increasing integration of project-centered practices in the engineering classroom, the results of this study are anticipated to be beneficial to other instructors who are trying to transition students from the well-defined expectations of many teacher-centered classrooms to the open-ended expectations of a project-centered environment.