Abstract:

In higher education, high quality teaching and learning has a defining characteristic of high student engagement as it impacts various stakeholders across different contexts of teaching and learning. The lack of student engagement among higher education learners is quite evident due to use of passive teaching and learning approaches in many classrooms. Students who are not motivated to take charge of their own learning, who lack persistence, who avoid deeper processing of information, do not actively participate in classroom and are not immersed and do not show affective interest in the learning process tend to have low self-esteem, poor attitude at workplace and mostly end up as under achievers in their fields and future careers.

Constructivist learning processes like Experiential Learning provides enriching experience to the students to enhance their engagement levels by engaging them creatively, intellectually, physically, socially, and emotionally. The three main dimensions of student engagement include emotional engagement, behavioral engagement, and cognitive engagement. A learner is actively engaged throughout the process of experiential learning as it stimulates their cognitive, behavioral and emotional processes to think, reflect and act respectively by investigation, reflection, conceptualization and experimentation. The overall student engagement is enhanced as the process of experiential learning enables them to question, reflect, solve problems, improves their self-accountability, innovate new ideas and construct knowledge through meaningful interaction with peers, materials, and facilitators.

Students are placed in project-based learning (PjBL) environment to enhance their student engagement through the process of experiential learning. Acting as a vehicle for experiential learning, PjBL allows learners to explore real world as well as immersive simulated environments through hands on activities and actively stimulates student's engagement levels all the while broadening and visualizing the theoretical concepts through practical application. Experiential learning’s experience through project-based learning engages learners to solve complex authentic problems and develop new skills.

The purpose of this ongoing research is to formulate a framework to facilitate educators in promoting experiential learning approach in a project-based learning environment in aims to augment behavioral, cognitive, and emotional processes by fostering their student engagement. A mixed method research design approach will be used in this study. The approach will focus on obtaining quantitative data and supporting it with qualitative data The research instruments that will be used for data collection will include Likert Scale surveys, open ended questionnaires, and structured and unstructured interviews. Participants for this research would be university students enrolled in creative multimedia technology course.

This conceptual paper aims to produce a conceptual framework on the ongoing research study that will provide educators with the fundamental insight to students experiential learning experience in a project-based learning environment which will impact their student engagement. The significance of this will allow educators to produce learners that are engaged, motivated to learn and take charge of their learning process. Having more engaged students will increase their overall performance in the classroom.

Keywords:

Experiential-learning, student-engagement, project-based learning, conceptual framework.