Comparative analysis of conventional, experiential, project-based, and blended pedagogies across diverse learner groups in undergraduate renewable energy engineering education

Renewable energy engineering education necessitates innovative pedagogical approaches to support interdisciplinary learning to accommodate diverse learners with technically complex curricula. However, empirical evidence concerning the influence of different pedagogies on heterogeneous learner groups in undergraduate renewable energy engineering courses is limited. A comparative pedagogical intervention was implemented with 124 final-year engineering students to assess learners’ performance across conventional, experiential, project-based and blended learning pedagogies. Students were categorized on the basis of their previous academic performance as advanced, medium and slow learners and categorized on the basis of locality as rural and urban learners. Moreover, cross-combination groups based on academic performance and locality are categorized. Repeated-measures ANOVA followed by Tukey's post hoc test was carried out to determine the significance between the different groups, with a minimum p value of 0.05 considered to indicate statistical significance. Project-based and blended pedagogical approaches demonstrated significantly higher learner performance than conventional and experiential approaches across most learner categories did (p < 0.05). Compared with rural learners, urban learners generally achieved higher scores, whereas medium and slow learners showed substantial improvement under learner-centered approaches. Effect size analysis revealed predominantly large pedagogical effects, particularly among urban slow learners (ηp 2 = 0.353), urban medium-sized learners (ηp 2 = 0.302) and slow learners overall (ηp 2 = 0.279). The findings demonstrate that learner-centered pedagogical approaches, particularly project-based and blended learning, positively influence academic performance in renewable energy engineering education. This study emphasizes the importance of embracing flexible and interactive teaching methods to effectively support diverse learner groups and improve overall learning results.