Societal Impact Projects help first-year bachelor students to understand the relevance of their education for societal issues. As such it was designed to thrive students’ intrinsic motivation to study.
Design of the programme
This extra-curricular learning arch was shaped according to the principles of Self-Determination Theory, fostering the basic psychological needs, autonomy, feeling competent and relatedness. Students work in small teams supervised by a member of faculty staff. The member of faculty staff brings in a broad domain of their interest/expertise. Within the context of this domain of interest, the students in the team define a specific, societally relevant problem that they want to work on. This small structure provides students with relatedness to other group members and to the topic. Students set the pace of their work, the depth of any investigation and how they present their final outcomes, this fosters their autonomy and feeling of competency. A workshop on Creative Problem Solving, divided over a number of sessions, provides them comfort in running the project, focusing on a specific problem and developing innovative approaches.
Learning objectives
This learning arch has been designed to provide students with a feeling of the relevance of their education and thus enhance their intrinsic motivation for learning and studying.
Successes and Challenges
The Societal Impact Projects started in 2019-2020 and have since then yearly involved about 10% of the first-year students of the bachelor of Biomedical Sciences. Students who participate appreciate their regular education more than students who follow only the regular programme. For staff supervising the student teams seeing the drive and enthusiasm that the participating students develop is most motivating.
A challenge is the continuation of the Societal Impact Projects. In spite of its success, it is not seen as ‘core business’ and thus subject to financial cuts in education.
Scale and structure
The Societal Impact Projects started as an extracurricular learning opportunity for first-year bachelor-students of Biomedical Sciences. Every year about ten percent of all students joined one of the projects. In the last two years we opened the programme also for students from Health Sciences, Economics and the Maastricht Science Programme. So far only a few of them joined the projects.
Vision for the future
A first challenge is to secure finances for next years to continue this extracurricular learning opportunity. Trusting that we will find ways to cover this, further ambitions are to increase intake of non-biomedical sciences students in the Societal Impact Project and thus increasing the diversity of the student teams. Also, we want to increase the involvement of external stakeholders, ideally making the full team members, and thus setting a stage for co-learning.
