NSF Award
2106322
This project focuses on engineering identity (EI), which measures how strongly a person identifies with being an engineer and serves as an indicator of persistence and retention in engineering. The project is aligned with the goals of the Research Initiation in Engineering Formation program by investigating how teamwork explains or is explained by EI among undergraduate engineering students and to support a community of new researchers conducting engineering education research. Repeated calls from engineering employers and educational accreditation bodies have stressed teamwork training in undergraduate education. This emphasis has led to a proliferation of studies on how teamwork promotes metacognitive ability, communication, and related skills. However, less is known about how teamwork informs or is informed by the EI of students from diverse backgrounds. The connection between team-based experiences and engineering identity is instrumental to inclusive teaching and learning because EI may be disproportionately lower for some students. In addition, teamwork designed without considering EI may further exacerbate that gap. Although more students from diverse backgrounds are entering engineering programs, the challenges they face in performance expectations, resource access, and peer interactions still hamper their retention and advancement. In a university context, these challenges are most clearly manifested in student teams. This grant will: (1) analyze teamwork experience through the behaviors of and disagreement patterns between team members in a student population with high social and economic diversity; and (2) evaluate how teamwork informs EI. Disagreement patterns will be depicted by the variation in team members’ views on basic team constructs (task, process, satisfaction, cohesion, and relationship).<br/><br/>Grounded in dispersion theory, this project will employ a mixed-methods approach to understand the prevalence and disagreement patterns, illuminating how EI, gender, and other student-specific variables (demographics, transfer student, etc.) explain the likelihood of a student to disagree on tasks, process, and other teamwork constructs. The results have the potential to reveal gaps or equity issues. Moreover, by leveraging survey instruments that have been tested by prior NSF-funded work, this project will explore how teamwork experience, via a lens of behaviors and disagreement pattern, relate to EI. Thus, providing evidence on which behaviors are linked to stronger EI and which types of team dynamics (disagreement patterns) promote EI development when a disagreement occurs in teamwork. The project will develop a more robust model to effectively handle Likert-style variables on EI. It addresses new questions that are expected to shape future work on inclusive teamwork design and interventions, while illuminating the gains in estimation accuracy as a result of the use of the new model with codes written in an open-source program to facilitate dissemination. This project will acquaint three early- and mid-career faculty members with new methods in engineering education research. By leveraging teamwork experiences to strengthen the EI of diverse students, they will be able extend this research to many inclusive learning or teaching endeavors. This work will take place at a Hispanic-serving institution, where improvements in the curriculum and student experience in team-based coursework will lead to improved learning experiences for a diverse student body.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
