Sources Fostering Academic Well-Being: Students' Perspectives In A PBL Context

In a post-pandemic learning era, student academic well-being emerges to the attention of educational researchers. Referring to students’ thoughts and behaviors that contribute to doing well in an educational context and their academic life satisfaction, student academic well-being has a significant influence on their recruitment and retention, learning experience, academic achievement, and competence development. However, while academic well-being has been regarded as an important indicator of student persistence in their current study and learning outcomes, limited studies have explored engineering students’ academic well-being and other supportive factors in engineering education. While several studies have examined how well-being is constituted and how it can be measured from medical, mental health, and eudaimonic philosophical perspectives, understanding engineering student academic well-being from social-cognitive and sociocultural aspects is also important. This is because wellbeing is not only influenced by personal feelings and perceptions, but also dynamically framed by interpersonal relations, as well as contextual and institutional conditions. To increase retention and help engineering students to become agentic professionals, it is desirable to help them to become proactive and purposeful learners in their studies. Thus, aimed at filling in this literature gap, this study will adopt the Q methodology to explore how engineering students perceive the sources contributing to their academic well-being in a Danish university. Suggestions will be proposed to optimize future curriculum design to support student academic well-being