Implementation of PBL to enhance the soft skills of engineering students

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to look into the implementation of PBL in the teaching of engineering courses to enhance the students’ ability in soft skills. The importance of soft skills has been acknowledged in most occupations and many organizations make selection and performance evaluation decisions based in part on employees’ soft skills. Problem Based Learning (PBL) is a pedagogical approach that has the potential to harness students’ ability in soft skills. Thus, this study looks into the implementation of PBL at a private university in Malaysia based on the lecturers’ industry experience, teaching experience and the engineering program they are in. A set of questionnaire is given to 90 lecturers teaching engineering courses to gauge the extent to which PBL is employed by the lecturers. An independent-samples t-test was conducted to compare the mean scores of the two groups which were the lecturers with industry experience and the ones without industry experience on the teaching approaches employed by them. A one-way between-groups analysis of variance (ANOVA) is conducted to explore the teaching methods employed by lecturers of different years of teaching experience and engineering programs. The analysis showed that 77.7 % of the lecturers prefer to employ problem-based learning (PBL) in their teaching of engineering courses. The results also revealed that the preference stayed constant in relation to the lecturers’ experience with the industry, years of teaching experience and the engineering program they are in. Thus, this illustrates that the lecturers prefer to employ student-cantered approach which lead to producing students with better soft skills like critical thinking. Similar patterns appeared in relations to the comparison by years of teaching experience, where lecturers with 6-10 years of teaching experience highly employed PBL. On the comparison by engineering program, lecturers from Chemical engineering (CE) program show the most frequently usage of PBL. The study also found that the soft skills that could be enhanced through PBL are critical thinking and problem solving skills, communication skills and teamwork skills.