Engineering Design for Community Impact: Investigating Constructive Alignment in an Innovative Service-Learning Course

In this innovative practice, work in progress paper, we examined the degree of constructive alignment in a pilot course informed by service-learning. Constructive Alignment refers to the degree of alignment between an instructor’s intentions and students’ experiences of a course. Data for the study were derived from a narrative constructed from the instructor’s reflections, describing intentions and experiences, coupled with thematic analysis of a transcript of a class discussion in which students were prompted to express their expectations for the course and their experiences of it. The instructor’s intentions were to take students through the experience of doing a real-world engineering project with community impact. Students had signed up for this course with expectations reasonably aligned with this plan. What they did not expect was how open-ended the engineering process would be, how it would demand intrinsic motivation for them rather than focusing on grades, and the degree to which the process would rest on communication skills, with substantial in-class discussion.