To respond to the challenges posed by sustainability, students increasingly need new competencies, including systems thinking, critical thinking, anticipatory thinking, integrated problem-solving competence, collaboration, and self-awareness. While the literature predominantly focuses on students’ knowledge and awareness of sustainability, attention to students’ enactment of agency to develop such competencies for sustainability remains insufficient. The present study explores university students’ perceptions of their enactment of agency for sustainability while studying in a systemic problem- and project-based learning (PBL) environment. Driven by a proposed conceptual framework embracing three interrelated dimensions of student agency—personal values, agentic behaviors, and contexts of action—the study included an analysis of 87 responses to an online qualitative survey and follow-up interviews with six participants. While the study identified multiple sources of student agency regarding personal values such as motivation and efficacy beliefs, a gap emerged between students’ awareness and their actual engagement in sustainability practices. Several contextual factors were shown to constrain their engagement. The study offers practical implications for supporting students’ actions towards sustainability.

In response to the challenges posed by globalization and internationalization, engineering education programs are increasingly focused on knowledge, technologies, and competence that meet global needs. Against this backdrop, higher engineering students are often encouraged to collaborate in teams with others from diverse, cultural, and disciplinary backgrounds, for the purpose of preparing them to accommodate change and innovation across international working contexts. Within a growing number of intercultural systematic and meta-analysis reviews in engineering education, little attention has been paid to intercultural team characteristics, and even less has been given to the challenges of intercultural teamwork and the relevant coping strategies. Using a systematic approach, this paper reviewed 77 journal articles to identify the intercultural team characteristics of engineering students based on team formats, level of collaboration, learning goals, evaluation methods, and learning gains. Through the process of intercultural collaboration, several challenges and corresponding coping strategies were reported at the individual, relational, and contextual levels. Recommendations for future practice for engineering educators and programs faculties, and future research directions for engineering educational researchers, are proposed in order to support engineering students’ intercultural team learning.

Contribution: This study explores the elements engineering students perceive as important for developing their learner agency in the context of intercultural project-based learning (PBL) teams. Background: The concept of learner agency has recently gained prominence due to its relevance for student-centeredness, autonomy, self-regulation, and collaboration. Certain pedagogical approaches are known to specifically support the development of learner agency, including PBL, in which learners are provided with active, self-directed, and collaborative learning tasks. PBL practice is also increasingly diverse, emphasizing intercultural collaboration in teams. However, learner agency has received little research attention in PBL settings, and even less in intercultural PBL. This study contributes to the existing literature on the development of learner agency in intercultural PBL teams. Research Question: What elements do engineering students consider important for supporting their learner agency development in an intercultural PBL team context? Methodology: Theoretically, learner agency is framed within three interrelated dimensions, namely, intrapersonal, behavioral, and environmental. Based on this framework, a survey instrument with 31 items was constructed and responses were obtained from 310 engineering students. The survey used expert review, student piloting, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and Cronbach’s alpha to test content validity, construct validity, and reliability. The descriptive and demographic statistics were examined through $t$ -test and the analysis of variance test. Findings: Five factors emerged from EFA: 1) interest and motivation; 2) self-efficacy; 3) self-regulated behaviors in teams; 4) team dynamics; and 5) external support. The statistical analysis shows that the interest and motivation factor was perceived by the engineering students as the most important. Furthermore, several demographic variables, including gender, nationality, year of study, and type of PBL learner based on their level of experience with PBL, were found to impact engineering students’ agency development.

In response to the opportunities and challenges posed by rapid technological advancement, digital transformation (DT) has recently emerged as a key concept in higher engineering education. DT involves using digital technologies to transform educational and pedagogical practices to enhance the learning and teaching experiences, prepare students for the needs of industry, and foster innovation. Despite a growing number of small-scale empirical studies concentrating on digitalization at lower single-activity and classroom levels, the practices of traditional education largely remain. There is a need for more systematic and holistic frameworks to facilitate and guide DT in engineering education. This study reviews 13 studies, using a systematic approach to identify and analyze the literature on frameworks for DT of engineering education. Several characteristics are identified, including types of DT frameworks and models; drivers of DT; and digital learning tools and types. In addition, various anticipated outcomes of DT reported in the included studies are described at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels. Recommendations for future practices for engineering students, educators, and institutions and future research directions for engineering educational researchers are also proposed to support the further development of digital education.

This study explores how engineering students develop learner agency in an intercultural PBL (problem- and project-based learning) environment, along with the factors that affect their development. Theoretically, learner agency is framed within three interrelated dimensions: intrapersonal, behavioural, and environmental. A narrative inquiry approach is adopted to investigate 11 engineering master’s students’ perceptions of their agency development. The findings reveal 10 elements perceived as ways to develop learner agency of engineering students, namely belief in their own self-efficacy, motivation, global engineering identity, goal-setting, planning, monitoring, reflecting, trust building, team atmosphere, and support from supervisors and institutions. These results also show that different factors affect the building of learner agency for engineering students, such as students’ experiences before undertaking a master’s degree, their level of advancement in the program, the culture of each study program, communication styles, and the composition of the project group.

This study explores engineering design students’ perceptions of their agency for sustainability in a Danish problem- and project-based learning (PBL) context. A conceptual framework is proposed with three dimensions: personal, action, and contextual. Q methodology was adopted to investigate the subjective views of 24 first-year undergraduate students in a Sustainable Design program regarding the most important contributors in their development of agency for sustainability. The Q factor analysis identified three prevailing opinions, which emphasized: 1) The professional role of engineering designers to act for the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); 2) The role of the formal curriculum in building the foundations to act for the SDGs; and 3) Collaboration within and beyond the university. These results indicate the complexity of student agency and highlight PBL's effectiveness for supporting students’ learning for sustainability across all three dimensions of student agency. The results also suggest that institutions and educators should design more formal and informal sustainability-related activities with clear structures and well-defined regulations and strategies for sustainability.