Pedagogical imperatives in the teaching of project management

This research builds on previous work conducted within the area of professional civil engineering education that explores pedagogical implications of teaching project management within the civil engineering discipline. The focus is to explore how pedagogical considerations impact on the experience of civil engineering students studying project management. This exploration utilises data gathered from a survey of 410 management and civil engineering students studying project management across four UK universities. Data analysis was conducted using a combination of exploratory data analysis, three-way multidimensional scaling and property fitting. Although differences in salience were found, the existence of common dimensions of project management pedagogy suggests two important implications: first that project management is independent of specific discipline peculiarities (and by implication, interdisciplinary), and second that the approach to teaching should take into account the context within which civil engineering students operate.