News

Two SoTL Grants Awarded to EEE Projects on Student Success and Team Learning

• Wednesday, 17 June 2026

We are pleased to announce that two educational innovation projects from Electrical Engineering Education section have been awarded a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) grant by the Dutch National Education Institute (NKO, formerly NRO).

The national SoTL programme supports lecturers and educational teams who investigate challenges in their own teaching practice and develop evidence-informed approaches to improve student learning. Through systematic inquiry, reflection, and dissemination, SoTL projects contribute not only to local educational improvement but also to the broader scholarship of higher education teaching and learning.

Both awarded projects will receive approximately €35,000 in funding and will run over the coming 18–24 months.

Helping First-Year Engineering Students Make Better Decisions

The first project, "Early Signals, Better Choices: Diagnosing and Supporting Readiness in First-Year Engineering Students," is by İlke Ercan, Bahareh Abdi and Riëlle Hondelink.

The project addresses a common challenge in engineering education: many first-year students enter university motivated and capable, yet uncertain about whether they are on track, particularly in mathematics. Students often make critical decisions about study strategies, effort, and help-seeking before they fully understand university expectations.

Working within a first-year Electrical Engineering gateway course, the team will investigate how students judge their academic readiness, how those judgments evolve over time, and how they relate to academic performance and progression. By combining readiness surveys, assessment data, mentoring interactions, and student interviews, the project aims to identify early signals that can help both students and instructors respond more effectively.

A key outcome will be an open-access readiness toolkit that enables educators to recognise different readiness profiles, support student self-reflection, and provide timely interventions that strengthen learning, persistence, and first-year success.

Improving Teamwork and Fairness in Project-Based Learning

The second awarded project, led by Seyedmahdi Izadhkast and Hendrik Bosma, focuses on strengthening teamwork and peer assessment in large-scale project-based engineering courses.

Project-based learning is a cornerstone of engineering education, but it also brings recurring challenges, including unequal workload distribution, free-riding, communication difficulties, team conflicts, student drop-out during projects, and concerns about the fairness of group assessment.

Building on existing peer-evaluation data collected across multiple courses, the project will investigate patterns in team dynamics and identify early indicators of collaboration problems. The team will then design and evaluate evidence-informed interventions, including improved peer-feedback processes, student and instructor training, structured reflection activities, and student involvement in refining peer-evaluation practices.

The project aims to develop scalable approaches that improve collaboration, support learning outcomes, and create fairer and more meaningful assessment of individual contributions within team-based projects.

Advancing Evidence-Informed Engineering Education

Together, these two projects reflect the EEE section's commitment to evidence-informed educational innovation. While one project focuses on supporting students during their transition into university-level engineering education, the other addresses the quality of teamwork and collaboration throughout the curriculum.

The resulting tools, insights, and educational resources will be shared with colleagues within the faculty and the wider higher-education community, contributing to ongoing improvements in engineering education in the Netherlands and beyond.

We congratulate İlke, Bahareh, Riëlle, Mahdi, and Hendrik on this achievement and look forward to following the impact of their projects.