Siara Isaac1*
Joelyn de Lima1,2
Yousef Jalali1
Valentina Rossi2
Samuel Schmid3Stefan Gabriel Popescu4
Daniel Tozadore4
Jessica Dehler Zufferey1- 1Center for Learning Sciences (LEARN), EPFL, The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
- 2Teaching Support Center, EPFL, The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
- 3Service Santé des Étudiant-es, Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland
- 4Computer-Human Interaction for Learning and Instructions, EPFL, The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
Introduction: Experiential learning is well-suited for developing transversal skills; however, poor understanding of pedagogical conditions for skill development reduces the contributions of such approaches in engineering education. This paper examines how adjusting the constraints of collaborative design tasks can increase engagement and refine students’ personal development goals.
Methods: Eighty-five engineering students participated in activities, based on the 3T PLAY framework, that emphasized specific skills. Students evaluated their designs, reported their emotional state, self-assessed their transversal skills, and identified the skills they wanted to develop.
Results: Analysis showed that the specific constraints of each experiential activity influenced the skills prioritized by students while increasing the specificity of the skills they cited. Students’ evaluation of their design and emotional states show high engagement and potential for eliciting pedagogically relevant emotions for sustainability.
Discussion: The findings indicate adjusting the characteristics of design projects, particularly task constraints, can increase students’ awareness of key transversal skills. Additionally, the results support the use of the proposed micro-experiential learning activity structure to integrate scaffolded support for transversal skill development into engineering courses.
1 Introduction
Despite disagreements on terminology (Berdanier, 2022; Habbal et al., 2024), relevant stakeholders including educators, employers, students and accreditation bodies recognize that engineering students need robust transversal/professional/generic/transferable skills (Crawley et al., 2011; Busteed, 2014; Direito et al., 2014; Brunhaver et al., 2018; Engineers Australia, 2019; Kolmos and Holgaard, 2019; Hirudayaraj et al., 2021; Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, 2023; European Network for Accreditation of Engineering Education, 2023; European Society for Engineering Education, 2025). These diverse non-technical skill sets, including planning, intrapersonal and interpersonal skills, are essential for engineering students being able to make the most of their disciplinary skills.
Studies have, however, repeatedly identified that current practices in engineering education are not adequately equipping students with the level of transversal skills they need (Passow, 2012; Donald et al., 2019; Kovacs et al., 2020; Kovacs et al., 2023a; Craps et al., 2022; de Lima et al., 2024). Engineering students also report a lack of support for skills development, with only 14% reporting that their courses enable them to acquire the skills they need for their academic and professional futures (Caeiro-Rodríguez et al., 2021). There are two major aspects underpinning this insufficiency. First, as transversal skill development is often a consequence of student involvement in extra-curricular and non-mandatory project work, many students do not experience enough effective opportunities to develop their skills. Second, when transversal skills are addressed in the compulsory curriculum, the same skill sets are repeatedly included in most courses rather than a coordinated, wide range of transversal skills across their courses and stages (Kovacs et al., 2020). These two aspects result in many students not obtaining the breadth and/or depth of competence in the skills they need for their projects during their studies and consequently the ability to successfully transition into the professional engineering workforce.
Engineering students certainly encounter many situations which require transversal skills during their studies, from team projects to design briefs. Indeed, the integration of more projects, especially through project-based learning or challenge-based learning, is a common trend in engineering curricula (Yadav et al., 2011; Noguez et al., 2025; Robledo-Rella et al., 2025). Multiple researchers have also explored the impacts of such interventions on students’ transversal skill development (Perrenet et al., 2000; Boelt et al., 2022; Chans et al., 2025; Martínez-Gómez and Nicolalde, 2025). It has, however, been established that effective skill development requires deliberate pedagogical interventions in addition to opportunities to experience and implement the skills (National Research Council, 2012; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2017; Picard et al., 2022; Kovacs et al., 2023b). Simultaneously, instructors require more empirical evidence and pedagogical support about what constitutes effective conditions for transversal skill development at the level of an individual class period or course (Willmot and Colman, 2016; Isaac et al., 2023a; Dokter, 2024). Other important factors include students’ perceptions of their own abilities and their beliefs about how to best develop their skills (Lowe et al., 2025). The 3T PLAY trident framework is a recent evidence-informed example of an initiative to enable instructors to improve support for transversal skills development (Isaac and de Lima, 2024a) that includes assisting students to identify skill development opportunities for themselves.
1.1 3T PLAY trident framework for teaching of transversal skills at the scale of individuals courses and projects
The 3T PLAY trident framework describes three elements that should be included in instructional interventions aimed at transversal skills development (Isaac et al., 2024). This consists of (i) Knowing: conceptual knowledge underpinning the skills and associated strategies, (ii) Experiencing: opportunities to apply the target skills in low-stakes, rapid feedback conditions, and (iii) Learning from Experience: prompts to encourage students to step back and reflect on how they can transfer learning from this experience into their next relevant task (Figure 1).
Figure 1. The 3T PLAY trident framework for transversal skills development. Reproduced with permission from Isaac et al. (2024).
The following example illustrates how the trident framework can be operationalized to promote development of specific transversal skills, using the case of collaborative decision-making skills. Team projects necessarily provide students with many opportunities to make collaborative decisions, however without accompanying pedagogical scaffolding it is erroneous to assume that students are improving their abilities to make decisions together. The 3T PLAY approach recommends creating brief low-stakes (even playful) tasks for students to practice (Experiencing) their decision-making such as the design of a fictional campus Makerspace. Prior to the decision–making, students should be provided with conceptual knowledge (Knowing) about the challenges and best practices for effective collaborative decision making. Finally, students should engage in metacognitive or meta-emotional reflection that supports their capacity to transfer their learning into future contexts (Learning from Experience) via self-monitoring and evaluation prompts. For instance, students may assess whether their decision-making process is suitable for the current phase of a project, reflect on why a particular strategy worked better than expected, or consider why a previously successful strategy failed in this instance. This reflective capacity helps students recognize when a different approach is needed and adapt their strategies accordingly. An educational intervention that includes the three elements of the trident framework will be more effective in supporting students to develop robust transversal skills than experiences that are missing one or more of the aspects.
1.2 Tuning design tasks to support students learning the transversal skills they need
While previous work has identified that engineering teachers and students deem transversal skills to be important, it has also highlighted that both groups may not be familiar with the conditions needed to develop such skills (Dokter, 2024; Isaac et al., 2023a; Kovacs et al., 2023b) nor familiar with the breadth of skills included in criteria set by accreditation bodies (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, 2023; Commission des titres d’ingénieur, 2023; Engineers Australia, 2019; European Network for Accreditation of Engineering Education, 2023; The Engineering Council, 2023). This is apparent in the skills listed in course documents (Kovacs et al., 2020) and the skills included in students’ narrow focus (de Lima et al., 2024). This lack of breadth is an issue for students’ effective self-regulation of their transversal skills development, as what students learn is influenced by their perception of what they are expected to learn (Kuhn and Rundle-Thiele, 2009; de Wijngaards- Meij and Merx, 2018). It is therefore relevant to document the skills that students deem important and how participating in activities which require specific transversal skills may influence the skills they priorities. Additionally, encouraging students to focus on and monitor their skill development can improve both their self-efficacy and skill acquisition (Kitsantas et al., 2004). Adjusting or tuning the specific constraints in a task would create conditions that bring associated transversal skills into focus. This would allow instructors to intentionally design the projects they assign students to prompt the development of specific transversal skills. Thus, instructors would be able to use the characteristics of tasks to assist students to refine their personal development goals for transversal skills in terms of setting specific goals and monitoring their own progress for skill development.
1.3 Tuning design tasks to promote cognitive and emotional engagement
Engagement promotes learning by directing attention, cognitive activity and supporting persistence in the face of difficulty. The importance of cognitive engagement and active learning for STEM higher education is well established (Freeman et al., 2014; Theobald et al., 2020), and there is increasing interest in how emotional engagement shapes engineering students’ learning (Lönngren et al., 2024; Krivoshchekov et al., 2025). When working together in groups, students can simultaneously experience different types of emotions including social, epistemic, and achievement emotions (Pekrun and Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2012; Atiq and Batra, 2024). These emotions are not static; they evolve as the semester and learning progresses (Kellam et al., 2018). Pekrun et al. (2023) found activity emotions such as enjoyment and anger were linked to learning strategies, with enjoyment positively correlating with cognitive engagement, self-regulation, and effort. Anger had corresponding negative correlations. While anxiety can be positively correlated with regulating achievement behavior (Pekrun et al., 2023), climate anxiety is increasingly present among young people due to concern about the future of the planet (Khalaim and Budziszewska, 2024). Increasing awareness of the role of emotions in learning underlines the need for students to learn how to acknowledge and manage their emotions (Kotluk et al., 2024). Accordingly, higher education institutions are being called on to provide more support for students to deal with climate anxiety including acknowledging emotional distress when discussing sustainability to both improve students’ mental health and to enable them to make more constructive contributions (Khalaim and Budziszewska, 2024).
Achievement emotions such as pride, relief, and shame are often assessed in research studies by having participants react to real or imagined feedback, such as success or failure on a test (Pekrun et al., 2023). Achievement emotions can affect students’ thought, action, and performance (Pekrun et al., 2023), making them relevant to creating and maintaining students’ engagement in learning activities. Moral emotions are also relevant for the development of students’ transversal skills, as guilt and shame have been found to positively affect ethical motivation (Higgs et al., 2020) and anger to disrupt ethical decision making (Kligyte et al., 2013). Thiel et al. (2013) found that the emotional content in ethics case studies assisted students to transfer the ethical principles addressed in another case study and Watts et al. (2017, p. 27) review study concluded that mild or moderate emotional arousal when examining ethics case studies was most pedagogically effective. Similarly, Hoffman (2008) found that excessive emotions can lead people to curtail their ethical reflections. It is clearly important to consider students’ emotions when designing experiential learning activities due to their impact on learning (Krivoshchekov et al., 2025).
1.4 Using self-evaluation to prompt meta-cognitive reflection for developing transversal skills
Assessing transversal skills in engineering education has been identified by multiple studies and meta-analyses as both being important and challenging (Shuman et al., 2005; Badcock et al., 2010; Cruz et al., 2019; Chen et al., 2020; Picard et al., 2022; Douglas et al., 2023; Chadha and Heng, 2024). A scoping review on skill development literature in engineering in the last 4 decades identified that affordances and impediments to assessments are a major focus in these studies (Chadha and Heng, 2024). One of the main reasons is that professional skills have a strong “process” component, which evade traditional assessment methods like final reports, presentations, or products as they do not adequately capture students’ ability to select and implement these process skills (Shuman et al., 2005; Howe et al., 2017). The required shift from product-oriented to process-oriented assessment methods calls for alternative and robust evaluation strategies (Shuman et al., 2005). In a systematic review on assessments of competencies in engineering education, Cruz et al. (2019) found questionnaires and rubrics were used most frequently. Methods grouped in this category included students’ self-assessment of their own skill development (Cruz et al., 2019; Chadha and Heng, 2024). Despite the challenges associated with self-assessment (Chen et al., 2020), multiple studies report their use, particularly when measuring self-efficacy and meta-cognition. Self-assessments, especially reflective assessments, are proposed to be beneficial both as a research tool (Cruz et al., 2019), and as a pedagogical tool promoting self-monitoring and self-regulation (Picard et al., 2022).
An important consideration when selecting assessment tools is the validity, reliability and fairness of the instrument (Douglas et al., 2023), something which unfortunately is frequently missing from many studies that assess transversal skill development (Cruz et al., 2019). However, there are several validated instruments that measure skill competencies (Bergersen et al., 2014; van Laar et al., 2018) or perceptions of skill competencies (Schwarzer and Jerusalem, 1995; Blomquist et al., 2016; Chan et al., 2017; Chan and Luk, 2021; Cruz et al., 2021). One such instrument that can be used both by instructors and researchers is the Interprofessional Project Management Questionnaire (IPMQ) (Tormey and Laperrouza, 2023). The IPMQ is a psychometrically valid and reliable standardized self-report questionnaire designed to measure students’ self-efficacy across the four aspects of project planning, risk assessment, ethical sensitivity, and interprofessional communication, specifically in the context of engineering education. It uses metacognitive prompts to stimulate self-reflection, which can help students to become more aware of their own thinking and learning processes.
1.5 Research questions
As demonstrated in the sections above, it is important for engineering educators to improve the support they offer to students for developing their transversal skills. Research-based practical guidance on how instructors should design individual pedagogical interventions is lacking. Starting from the 3T PLAY framework for structuring experiential learning opportunities we wanted to know how teachers can target specific transversal skills relevant for their students.
This study looks therefore at the following specific research questions:
1. What transversal skills do students want to improve, and how does participating in a collaborative design task change their expressed interests?
2. How do the constraints imposed by micro-experiential design tasks influence
a. The specific skills students identify as important to develop?
b. Students’ evaluation of, and feelings about, their design?
c. Students’ self-assessment of their transversal skills?
2 Materials and methods
2.1 Settings and participants
This study was conducted at a mid-sized European engineering institution that offers a wide range of engineering programs. Ethical approval for this study was obtained through the institutional human research ethics committee (HREC 077-2023).
Students in their second or third year of Bachelor studies and Masters level were recruited using an online recruitment tool where students can see and apply to participate in various studies. They were given monetary compensation for their time equivalent to 32 €. Ninety students were scheduled in groups of 4–6 for a 90′ session based on their availability, resulting in each session being attended by students from a mix of study programs and years of study. Students completed individual pre and post surveys bracketing one of three different design tasks, which they completed as 18 teams (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Sequence of events in the experiential data collection sessions.
Our dataset comprises 85 individuals as technical issues prevented data collection from one session with five students. All students were current students of our institution, enrolled in 20 different engineering programs, and distributed across years of study with slightly more than half of students identifying as male.
2.2 Data collection and analysis
The experiment consisted of students engaging in one of three different collaborative design tasks (Drone, Makerspace, or Wind Turbine) each with a unique set of contextual constraints that each emphasized specific project skills. The characteristics of the Drone task have been previously reported (Isaac et al., 2023b). Detailed descriptions and teaching materials are available for the Makerspace (Isaac et al., 2024) and Wind Turbine activities (Isaac and de Lima, 2024b). Each task featured a significant degree of one type of constraint (indicated by bold text, listed first), with a second more implicit constraint (italic text) (Table 1).
Table 1. Details about the collaborative design tasks, their constraints, number of teams, and students.
Both before and after engaging in one of the three collaborative design tasks, students spent ~10 min responding to a paper-based survey. On both surveys, an open-ended prompt asked students to list three aspects of doing projects they wanted to personally improve. This open-ended approach was chosen to avoid influencing or limiting the transversal skills students reported as important for them to develop. After the task, students also responded to Likert style questions assessing their team’s design (three items) and their feelings about their experience (six items), and 12 self-assessment items from the IPMQ planning, ethical sensitivity and risk assessment scales (Tormey and Laperrouza, 2023; Supplementary Table S1). The pre and post surveys each included a case study which is not reported here.
For the quantitative analysis, in addition to descriptive statistics we used several statistical models. For each case (e.g., emotion, assessment of design), we created two linear mixed models: a full model containing both a random intercept term (team ID) and a fixed effect (task), and a base model containing just the random intercept term (no fixed effect). We compared these two models using a parametric bootstrap to evaluate whether the fixed effect improves the predictive power of the model for that case. The reported bootstrap p-value is calculated based on 1,000 simulations. In a few cases, the linear mixed model resulted in a singular fit because the estimated variance of the random intercept was essentially zero. In these cases, we dropped the random intercept term and fitted a linear model with just the fixed effect (task). Additionally, we calculated correlations (Kendall’s tau) between their evaluation of the team’s design and their emotions; note that this analysis ignores the non-independence associated with team ID that we addressed using the random intercept term in the mixed models. Cronbach’s alpha was used to confirm the underlying structure of the three design product evaluation items (𝛼 > 0.7). As the IPMQ items did not appear to represent a single factor (𝛼 < 0.7), we used exploratory factor analysis starting with using the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy to confirm that the partial correlations support factor analysis (MSA values ≥0.64) and Bartlett’s test of sphericity to ascertain that the correlation matrix was significantly different from an identity matrix [χ2(91) = 276.88, p < 0.001]. Maximum Likelihood Estimation with promax rotation was employed as the extraction method.
Students’ responses to the open-ended prompts were mostly brief (2–3 words) and were coded using qualitative content analysis (Schreier, 2014). We used a set of a priori codes based on the constraints imposed by the design tasks (e.g., risk management, planning, resource management, sustainability etc.). However, while coding, we also created new codes to capture the breadth of the skills that students included in their responses (e.g., financial reasoning, organization, maintaining goal focus). Each student statement was assigned as many codes as there were ideas expressed. While most statements were assigned to a unique code, some statements were assigned to more than one (e.g., “Make the planning with the members of the community, so they also participate” was assigned to both Planning skills and Teamwork).
2.3 Software
We used MAXQDA 2020 (VERBI Software, 2020) for qualitative analysis. Quantitative analysis was conducted with SPSS (v28) for the Cronbach’s alpha and the exploratory factor analysis, and otherwise with R Statistical Software (v 4.3.3) (R Core Team, 2024). In R, we used the dplyr (Wickham et al., 2023) and janitor (Firke et al., 2024) packages for data processing, lme4 (Bates et al., 2015) for fitting mixed models, pbkrtest (Halekoh and Højsgaard, 2014) for parametric bootstrapping of mixed models to estimate p-values, corrplot (Taiyun and Viliam, 2024) to plot correlation matrix, and grDevices (R Core Team, 2024) for graphical processing.
3 Results
3.1 (RQ1) students’ priorities for transversal skill development changed after participating in the collaborative design tasks
Prior to participating in the activity, the six skills that students reported most often wanting to develop were: “understanding the project,” “time management,” “planning skills,” “resource management,” “organization” and “risk management” (Table 2). These relatively broad formulations of skills can be characterized as skill categories. There were no instances of students responding with non-transversal skills or ideas that could not be categorized per these codes.
Table 2. Frequently cited project skills students wanted to develop, with representative responses.
Following their participation in the collaborative design tasks, there were significant shifts, both increases and decreases, in the transversal skills that students reported being most important for them to personally develop (Figure 3). Sharp drops were seen for four of the six skills cited most often in the pre-survey, particularly for “understanding of project,” “resource management,” and “teamwork.” “Risk management” and, to a lesser extent, “time management” do not follow the trend and remain frequently cited in the post-survey. Both skills relate to specific constraints experienced in the Makerspace design task.
Figure 3. Shifts in number of students who prioritized each transversal skill for development from before to after participating in collaborative design tasks. Created with Datawrapper.
In the post-survey, “decision making skills” vaulted up the ranking with increases also seen for “financial reasoning,” “maintaining goal focus,” and “perspective taking.” These post-survey priorities are closely linked to the pre-survey skills yet formulated in more specific ways that point to specific strategies. “Maintaining goal focus” is a key element underpinning “planning skills” while “decision making” is a key challenge in “teamwork.”
There are also some small shifts that are worth noting. The skills of “including sustainability considerations,” “negotiation,” “perspective taking” and “critical thinking and systems thinking” increased and are all directly related to constraints in at least one design task. It is concerning to note that “ethics” is barely present in either survey and additionally that “including social concerns” drops.
3.2 (RQ2a) how the constraints imposed by the collaborative design tasks affect the skills students intend to develop
While all the skills cited in the pre-survey could have been operationalized during any of the collaborative design tasks, the data showed diverging trends when students’ responses are separated based on the specific design task they encountered (Table 3). The overlap between skills targeted in each task (rows 1–2) and those cite by students are indicated with asterisks, while the open-ended nature of the design tasks naturally result in each group experiencing different conditions based on their team members and approach. Even within the limit of this relatively small data set, it is evident that the constraints of the three tasks influenced students’ post-survey responses.
Table 3. Heatmap showing net changes in the skills students identified as important (post-pre) due to specific constraints of collaborative design tasks.
In the Drone task, students collaboratively made a series of yes/no decisions related to implementing specific changes to the drone design in the goal of optimization for ornithological field researchers. These constraints resulted in a net increase of “decision making skills,” “financial reasoning” and “perspective taking” relative to the other two design tasks. The increase in these three skills occurred due to a shift away from “teamwork” and “resource management,” however collaborative decision making is a fundamental aspect of teamwork and money is a key resource to manage. Thus, we interpret these shifts not as significant changes in students’ transversal skills priorities but rather an increasing precision in how they articulate these skills.
For the Makerspace task, risk management exerted a major constraint due to the instructor introducing unforeseen events to disrupt delivery of “machines.” This difficulty compounded the challenges of coordination between the sub-teams to complete the model within the allotted time. The net increase of “risk management” and persistence of “teamwork” and “resource management” in the Makerspace students’ responses in contrast to the students with other design tasks and reflects the influence of these task constraints.
Trends in the importance of transversal skills for students who experienced the Wind Turbine task are less sharp. This task was unique among the three in assigning specific roles, a constraint which likely contributed to students citing “negotiation” and “contributing my point of view”. Students in both the Drone and Wind Turbine tasks cited “including sustainability considerations” and “critical and systems thinking” more often in the post-survey. These two design tasks were presented with significantly more context than the Makerspace task, requiring students to explicitly consider interactions with the broader environment.
Students experienced some time constraint in each of the three tasks, however the degree, intensity, and implications of the constraint varied considerably. In the Drone task, the time constraint was cognitive in that the time budget is depleted by decisions (i.e., installing a larger battery reduces the time available by 1 week). For the Wind Turbine, students were encouraged to advance in their discussions but without direct reference to time limits. However, in the Makerspace task the time constraint is experiential and prominent, with students experiencing pressure to place all the necessary pieces for their physical model within 30 min. These characteristics are reflected in the shifts in students’ priorities that show a slight increase for “time management” in the post-survey for the Makerspace task and a decrease for the other two tasks.
3.3 (RQ2b) students’ evaluation and emotions about their designs were not influenced by task constraints
Students were asked to evaluate their design based on the criteria of “Fit for purpose,” “Contributes constructively,” and “Embodies engineering principles” on a 6-point Likert- scale ranging from “Not at all” to “Very much.” Students in all tasks evaluated their designs positively across the three aspects (Figure 4). Assessing the internal consistency with Cronbach’s alpha, the total alpha value that indicates these 3 questionnaire items are measuring a single construct (0.765) and that the value drops if any single item is removed. We thus conclude that students did not perceive a difference in the capacity for their design to be, for instance, technologically robust yet destructive for society. We found no difference in students’ evaluations of their designs across the three tasks, using linear mixed models with group ID as a random intercept (0.19 ≤ p ≤ 0.51).
Figure 4. Students’ evaluations of their designs. “Not at all” was not used and one student did not respond to the “Embodies engineering principles” prompt.
Students reported predominantly positive emotions about the designs they proposed (Figure 5). Across all tasks, the most frequently reported positive emotion was “Happy,” and the most common negative emotion was “Anxious.” The only emotion that differed across the three tasks was that students in the Wind Turbine task report experiencing more anxiety about their design compared to students in other tasks (Supplementary Table S2) (p = 0.004 and p = 0.024 for Drone and Makerspace respectively).
Figure 5. Students’ responses to emotional profile questions for each task. “D” indicates Drone; “M” indicates Makerspace; “WT” indicates Wind Turbine.
The correlation matrix shows positive correlations between the three positive valence items (“Happy” “Proud,” and “Relieved”). The three negative valence items (“Angry,” “Ashamed,” and “Anxious”) were also positively correlated among themselves (Figure 6). Additionally, there was a negative correlation between the positive valence and negative valence items. It appears that students value “Embodies engineering principles” most strongly, as it is most strongly correlated with positive valence emotions (Kendall’s tau range is 0.39–0.45). The item “Fit for purpose” shows the weakest correlation with positive valence emotions (Kendall’s tau range is 0.28–0.40), indicating that this item influences students’ positive emotions least. Design evaluation was positively correlated with the positive valence emotions (“Happy,” “Proud,” and “Relieved”) and negatively correlated with the negative valence emotions (“Angry,” “Ashamed,” and “Anxious”). Thus, negative valence emotions appear to correlate with students being more critical of their design.
Figure 6. Correlation matrix (Kendall’s Tau) between students’ evaluations of their designs and their responses to emotional profile questions.
3.4 (RQ2c) students’ self-assessment of their project skills was not influenced by task constraints
The IMPQ self-evaluation instrument for project skills (Tormey and Laperrouza, 2023) was used as a measurement instrument, although it also has value as a metacognitive prompt for transversal skill development. The full instrument consists of 20 self-assessment items, built on a common stem “I am good at…” with a 5-point Likert response scale ranging from 5 (strongly agree) to 1 (strongly disagree) organized into a 4-factor structure. Our survey employed items from the factors of Ethical Sensitivity, Risk Assessment and Project Planning. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) using promax rotation and maximum likelihood estimation identified 3 underlying factors (Supplementary Figure S1). Imposing 3 factors on the EFA, we confirmed the item scales for risk assessment (three items) and ethical sensitivity (4 items) reported by Tormey and Laperrouza (2023). Our data for the self-assessment items related to project planning did not coalesce into a solid factor (Supplementary Table S3).
Students in our study rated themselves positively regarding their ethical sensitivity and slightly less positively for their risk assessment skills. Despite the lack of a stable scale for project planning, students’ response to these items also indicated generally high self-assessment.
The task constraints in the three tasks did not appear to influence students’ self-assessment of their own skills (Supplementary Figures S2–S4). This was confirmed by running three linear mixed models that found no statistically significant pairwise differences after applying the Bonferroni correction (adjusted p ≥ 0.1).
4 Discussion
This study provides insight into how the characteristics of design tasks can support engineering students to develop transversal skills, impacting particularly aspects of goal setting and engagement. Our observations indicate that 3T PLAY structured design tasks are cognitive and emotionally engaging, while enabling students to refine their transversal skills development goals.
Students have a clear understanding of transversal skills and are able to distinguish these skills from “disciplinary skills” and “knowledge.” This conclusion is based on our observation that zero students listed “disciplinary skills” or “content” in their responses. This is coherent with our findings in a previous study with engineering students (de Lima et al., 2024). It is also relevant to note that students’ responses reflect recurrent challenges of collaborative projects (Lermigeaux-Sarrade et al., 2021), indicating that they have previous experience with projects and are aware of common difficulties. Our findings on transversal skills prioritized by students are broadly coherent with a survey based on the CDIO (Conceive—Design—Implement—Operate) model of engineering education (Crawley et al., 2011; de Lima et al., 2024).
Participating in the collaborative design tasks did result in some changes in students’ transversal skills priorities post intervention, however the lack of drastic changes when considering the three tasks together indicates that students appear to have started with a solid understanding of their priorities with respect to transversal skill development. We did note two important aspects to the changes.
First, students were less likely to cite general skill sets and more likely to identify specific skills post-activity. For instance, while the skill sets of “understanding the project,” “time management,” “planning skills” were cited frequently in the pre-survey, the more specific skill formulations such as “decision making skills” and “financial reasoning” were more common in the post-survey. Two exceptions to this trend are “risk management” and “time management,” which remain frequently cited in the post-survey. Both of these skills relate to specific, major constraints experienced in the Makerspace design task, the experimental task where the inversion of the general trend is strongest. The post-survey formulations are more constructive in the sense that they are more explicit about the transversal skills and associated strategies that enable effective management of these aspects in collaborative project work. This precision is relevant to students’ development of relevant skill sets. A recent scoping review in engineering education also shows that this trend toward more specific and nuanced understanding of skills is occurring in the literature (Chadha and Heng, 2024).
Second, the specific constraints of each task directed students’ focus with respect to the skills they prioritized. Each of the skills listed by students could have potentially been operationalized during each of the tasks, as the three are collaborative, hands-on design-based activities involving teamwork, decision making and production of a deliverable within a brief time.
Students shift toward attributing more importance to “sustainability” and “critical & systems thinking” in both the Drone and Wind Turbine tasks, further emphasizing the influence of task constraints on their priorities. These two design tasks were presented with significantly more context than the Makerspace task, requiring students to explicitly consider competing criteria and interactions with the broader environment. Students in the Wind Turbine task were the only ones to have a net increase in citing the skills of “negotiation” and “contributing my point of view.” This was also the only task which assigned specific roles to students.
It is concerning to note that “ethics” is barely present in either survey and additionally that “including social concerns” drops. While prior work has identified the issue of engineering students excluding ethics from their purview (Isaac et al., 2023c; Lönngren, 2021), it is disappointing to note that even the more contextualized design tasks of the Drone and Wind Turbine did not elicit increased attention to ethics. Another possible explanation is that students do not see ethical considerations as a transversal skill, therefore they do not cite it among the project skills they need to develop.
All three tasks elicited similar positive evaluations from students of the design product and activity emotions, with happiness predominant. This indicates that the experiential 3T PLAY structured pedagogical approach was successful, as enjoyment has been shown to positively correlate with cognitive engagement, self-regulation, and effort (Pekrun et al., 2023). Anxiety was highest in the Wind Turbine task, an observation that may reveal that the context of this case study elicited climate anxiety (Khalaim and Budziszewska, 2024). Kotluk and Tormey (2025) found that even standard engineering ethics case studies had emotional dimensions for students, so it is likely that this case-based task that prompted students to consider multiple aspects of sustainability of materials caused students to connect to their concerns about the future. This interpretation is supported by noting that students’ achievement emotions (pride, relief) remained constant across the different tasks. While the Drone task was intended to introduce students to ethical implications of design decisions, this does not appear to have been adequate as students’ reported moral emotion of shame was the same as for other tasks. That the tasks did not elicit overly strong emotions is pedagogically desirable, as excessive emotional arousal has been found to discourage engagement with ethical decision making (Hoffman, 2008; Watts et al., 2017).
The design products were not scored by the research team in the experimental set up as the tasks served uniquely to create a project-context in which students could apply their project skills. The guides for 3T PLAY activities likewise do not provide students with opportunity to receive feedback on what they produce, as the objective is for students to be more attentive to the process of working together and thus implementing their skills in a low-stakes environment. The final learning from doing prompts in each design task ask students to reflect on their experience, including how the skills were implemented and what difficulties they encountered. Students thus produce some feedback for themselves through meta-cognitive and meta-emotional examination of their experience.
Students’ self-evaluation of their project skills via the IPMQ were in line with previous studies (Tormey and Laperrouza, 2023) and did not vary between the three tasks. This could indicate that the task constraints did not affect students’ perception of their skills at the broad/general level of the IPMQ items due to the short duration of the intervention. However, as students did become more precise in their description of the transversal skills they wanted to develop, the interventions may have improved their prior understanding of generic transversal skills and therefore introduced potentially opposing influences of improving skills while calibrating their perception of proficiency in the skill.
4.1 Limitations
The shifts in how students articulate their priorities illustrate the benefit of open-ended survey prompts. However, a limitation of using open-ended data is that our inference of increased specificity is that we therefore cannot claim that students themselves perceive this increased specificity.
Additionally, while students wrote fine-grained transversal skills they prioritized, their self-assessment of their skills via the IPMQ is quite broad. The limitations of this mismatch are potentially exacerbated by having only a post measure for the IPMQ. We therefore cannot make any definite claims about causal relationships between the specific task students engaged in, and their perceptions of their abilities. Our study is unable to determine if the lack of statistical differences in the self-assessment of students who engaged in the three tasks is due to a real lack of difference, an artefact arising from novices misjudging their abilities, or an insufficiently large sample.
Further work with similar pre-post assessments, with opportunities for students to repeatedly apply the target transversal skills, coupled with longitudinal measurement across a longer time period would provide useful information about tasks that support students’ transversal skill development.
4.2 Implications for instruction
The specific experiential design tasks resulted in students reporting different priorities for their transversal skills. These findings about how the design task constraints can influence the transversal skills that students priorities can be used by instructors to create project briefs that support skill development. As summarized in Table 4, our study suggests that the following constraints can be introduced or tuned to focus students’ attention on specific skills. In addition to introducing relevant constraints (Experiencing), the 3T PLAY trident framework recommends that instructors also include conceptual and practical information (Knowing) and reflection to promote transfer (Learning from Experience).
Table 4. Constraints instructors should consider incorporating into students’ projects to target the development of specific transversal skills.
5 Conclusion
The small scale of this study and the open-ended nature of the survey questions preclude us from confidently positing causal relationships. However, the instructional design of the 3T PLAY based activities do appear to elicit an appropriate level of emotional engagement and to direct students’ attention to transversal skills related to the specific task constraints. We do not claim that the brief practice provided during the experiment was sufficient for students to have developed the transversal skills they cite as important in the post-survey. Rather, as students’ engagement and perception of what is important informs what students do learn (Kuhn and Rundle-Thiele, 2009; de Wijngaards- Meij and Merx, 2018), we conclude that the activities were successful in creating appropriate conditions for the experiential learning of transversal skills needed in engineering. These essential preconditions for students’ development of transversal skills are intentionally supported by each of the three elements of the trident framework (Figure 1). This finding can be used to improve students’ skill development during projects in two ways. One way is to have student teams complete a brief 3T PLAY-type activity as an initial, team building experience to build their awareness of skills and strategies relevant to their course project. A second way is to implement the 3T PLAY framework by structuring course projects to include explicitly introductions to strategies for managing difficulties that will occur during the project and intermittent prompts for students to analyze their experiences encountering these difficulties to assist them to transfer their nascent skills to other contexts.
As European engineering students report a glaring lack of support to develop the transversal skills they need for their academic and professional futures (Caeiro-Rodríguez et al., 2021), there is a clear need for the 3T PLAY approach of using short, experiential activities to support students’ transversal skill development in advance or in parallel to larger, disciplinary projects. Our analysis suggests that 3T PLAY activities support students’ active engagement and trigger more comprehensive understanding of transversal skills and allow students to set themselves more specific goals, establishing more effective learning conditions. These findings are relevant at the level of individual courses and projects, supporting teachers to introduce practical activities to achieve learning goals often articulated at the curricular level. Instructors should consider using the trident framework to structure activities that target the development of transversal skills, for instance by using the open-access activity outlines and handouts provided in the 3T PLAY book (Isaac and de Lima, 2024b).
Data availability statement
The datasets presented in this article are not readily available due to conditions of ethical approval. Inquiries should be directed to c2lhcmEuaXNhYWNAZXBmbC5jaA==.
Ethics statement
The studies involving humans were approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Switzerland. The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.
Author contributions
SI: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. JdL: Formal analysis, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. YJ: Data curation, Investigation, Project administration, Writing – review & editing. VR: Investigation, Writing – review & editing. SS: Formal analysis, Writing – review & editing. SP: Investigation, Writing – review & editing. DT: Supervision, Writing – review & editing. JD: Funding acquisition, Project administration, Writing – review & editing.
Funding
The author(s) declared that financial support was received for this work and/or its publication. This project was supported by the LEGO Foundation.
Acknowledgments
We thank Barbara Bruno for conceptual contributions and logistical support during the development phase of this project, Christopher John Williams for his work on the development of the drone activity and data collection, and Mridul Thomas who provided expert consultation for the quantitative analysis.
Conflict of interest
The author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Generative AI statement
The author(s) declared that Generative AI was not used in the creation of this manuscript.
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Supplementary material
The Supplementary material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2025.1688568/full#supplementary-material
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Keywords: experiential learning, transversal skills, professional skills, instructional design, project-based learning, student perceptions, engineering education
Citation: Isaac S, de Lima J, Jalali Y, Rossi V, Schmid S, Popescu SG, Tozadore D and Dehler Zufferey J (2026) Tuning experiential activities’ constraints influences student engagement and focus on transversal skills. Front. Educ. 10:1688568. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1688568
Edited by:
Nakhat Nasreen, Aligarh Muslim University, IndiaReviewed by:
Timothy Reissman, University of Dayton, United StatesChris Chimwayange, University of South Australia, Australia
Copyright © 2026 Isaac, de Lima, Jalali, Rossi, Schmid, Popescu, Tozadore and Dehler Zufferey. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Siara Isaac, c2lhcmEuaXNhYWNAZXBmbC5jaA==