Congruence and friction between teachers' intentions and students' perceptions of CBL courses

Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) has become specifically popular in higher engineering education as it embraces authentic, active, and interdisciplinary learning that requires students' self-direction and collaborative decision-making. The CBL compass (van den Beemt et al. 2023) has been widely applied to capture the variety of educational innovations under the CBL label regarding their vision, teaching and learning, and support. As the tool only captures the teachers' intentions and goals, the question remains whether discrepancies occur with student perceptions of the CBL learning environment that may cause friction. Therefore, this research project explored these discrepancies more thoroughly with teachers and students from CBL courses at four technical universities across Europe. First, to understand the commonalities and differences between the courses, all courses were mapped with the CBL compass. Analyses of the outcomes showed that the courses varied regarding their implementation of the 36 indicators of CBL represented by the tool - most strongly regarding collaboration with internal and external stakeholders, assessment, and aspects of learning technologies, facilities, and support. In the next step, we applied the student version of the CBL compass to understand student perception of these indicators and capture differences with teachers' intentions. The results mostly show a high agreement between teachers' intentions and students' perceptions. Friction arises in indicators regarding the complexity of the challenge, the involvement of external stakeholders, and the assessment. The results do not only help our understanding of student learning gains and experiences in CBL but may feed back into teachers' CBL design processes.