Match or Mismatch: Engineering Faculty Beliefs about Communication and Teamwork versus Published Criteria-猫眼课题宝

匹配或不匹配：工程学院对沟通和团队合作的信念与已发布的标准

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2014

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作者：

M. Paretti;K. Cross;H. Matusovich

工程雇主、美国国家工程院（NAE）和工程认证机构ABET继续将沟通和团队合作视为工程专业毕业生进入专业实践的必要条件。学生提高这些和其他专业技能的愿望导致了工程课程中团队项目和沟通任务数量的增加。然而，教育研究人员和教育工作者都对当前工程学院在沟通和团队合作方面的信念和价值观知之甚少，也不知道这些学院的认识论如何影响整合和评估这些技能的方法。为了解决这一差距，本文根据已公布的沟通和团队合作标准，分析了对工程学院的采访数据。作为我们初步研究的基准，我们使用了由美国学院和大学协会（AACU）开发的VALUE标准。对数据子集的初步分析表明，工程学院和VALUE准则之间既有一致之处，也有差异之处。特别是，工程学院的信念与书面交流中强调上下文、目的和内容发展的准则一致，但对学科类型惯例和来源的关注较少。在团队合作领域，工程学院认识到解决冲突的重要性，但提供的价值准则中包含的其他标准很少。与此同时，教师们强调分配工作量和有效管理项目的重要性，这是一个没有很好地体现在标准中的领域。这些发现，一旦通过对完整数据集的分析得到完善，为教师发展提供了领域，但也建议对基础广泛的VALUE准则进行重要的学科特定调整。在学术和行业环境中，沟通和团队合作仍然是工程专业毕业生的首要成果，它们越来越多地融入工程课程，不仅是通过外部课程要求（例如技术写作课程），而且是在工程课程中。正如Shuman等人1在其2005年具有里程碑意义的专业技能综述中所说，沟通和团队合作都可以在工程课程中有效地教授，工程教育研究中对这两种技能进行了丰富的讨论2,3 -10。重要的是，这两种技能在工程内外都有很强的教学研究基础。工程交流作为英语的一个领域可以追溯到19世纪后期，技术交流已经发展成为写作研究的一个重要分支。此外，最近的工程教育文献包含了许多关于工程背景下沟通技巧的课程。关于团队合作的研究是最近的，可以追溯到20世纪50年代，人们更多地关注有效团队的创建和功能，而不是在教育环境中培养团队技能。尽管如此，工程教育文献再次包含了大量将团队纳入课程的策略（特别是在顶点水平），以及对工程团队动态的多项研究。尽管对沟通和团队合作进行了深入的研究，但工程学院在多大程度上参与并利用了这些丰富的文献，这一点尚不清楚。在沟通方面，一些研究人员探索了工程学院和写作学院之间反馈模式的差异11,12，或者更普遍地探索了学科学院对写作的看法13,14，研究结果表明，具有写作专业知识的教师和具有学科内容专业知识的教师之间存在交集和差距。但是，很少有研究考虑到教师对有效沟通的信念与学者在书面和口头沟通方面制定和发表的广泛接受的标准之间的关系。同样，尽管近年来对团队合作评估的研究有所增加，但很少有研究探讨教师在教学和评估学生表现时接受和/或应用团队合作研究人员制定的标准的程度。我们认为，如果我们希望为学生提供更有效的学习环境，就必须确定教师信念与当前研究之间的交叉点和差距。只有更好地理解教师对有效沟通和有效团队合作的看法，我们才能更充分地支持这些基于实证研究的信念，并解决差距或纠正误解。为此，本文探讨了以下研究问题：教师对有效沟通和有效团队合作的信念如何与基于经验的这两项技能标准相一致？作为解决这个问题的第一步，本文提出了一项大型混合方法研究的初步发现，该研究探索了教师和学生对团队合作和沟通的看法。背景：什么是“有效”？如上所述，来自写作、修辞学、写作研究、组织行为学、工业心理学和许多其他领域的学者对沟通和团队合作的有效性问题进行了广泛的探讨。在工程教育的狭窄领域内，诸如House等人19的工作为沟通提供了有用的评估标准，而诸如团队成员有效性综合评估（CATME） 16的工具为评估学生在团队中的表现提供了标准（以及基于网络的工具）。然而，在这两种情况下，这些特定于工程的准则，分别基于围绕沟通和团队合作的更广泛的文献。因此，在考虑分析教师信念并将其与现有文献进行比较的有意义的框架时，我们转向了一项更大的全国性努力，重点是为一系列通识教育成果制定评估标准-美国学院和大学协会（AACU）本科教育学习有效评估（VALUE）项目20。VALUE项目聚焦于通常与博雅教育相关的成果，汇集了来自AACU成员机构的教师，为从公民参与到综合学习再到阅读的成果制定了一套通用的标准，包括口头交流、书面交流和团队合作的标准。每个标题提供了学习成果和任何关键术语的总体定义，并为特定的、可测量的标准确定基准、里程碑和顶点性能标准。在大学和学科21、22的测试中，这些准则提供了一套有用的通用标准，用于开始探索工程学院的信念和期望如何与围绕沟通和团队合作的更大讨论相一致。表1列出了该分析中使用的书面沟通和团队合作的标准，并提供了“顶点”成就的定义，它作为我们分析（编码）的初步定义。表1：书面沟通和团队合作技能分析

Engineering employers, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and the engineering accreditation agency ABET continue to identify communication and teamwork as essential for engineering graduates going into professional practice. The desire for students to enhance these and other professional skills has led to an increase in the number of team projects and communication assignments included within engineering courses. However, educational researchers and educators alike know comparatively little about the beliefs and values of current engineering faculty with respect to communication and teamwork, or about how these faculty epistemologies affect approaches to incorporating and evaluating these skills. To address this gap, this paper analyzes data from interview with engineering faculty in light of published criteria for communication and teamwork. As our benchmark for this initial study, we use the VALUE rubrics developed by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AACU). Preliminary analysis of a subset of the data suggests areas of both alignment and disparity between engineering faculty and the VALUE rubrics. In particular, engineering faculty beliefs align with the rubrics’ emphasis on context and purpose and content development in written communication, but reflect less attention to disciplinary genre conventions and sources. In the teamwork domain, engineering faculty recognize the importance of conflict resolution, but offer few other criteria included in the VALUE rubric. At the same time, faculty emphasize the importance of distributing workload and managing the project effectively, an area not wellrepresented by the rubrics. These findings, once refined through analysis of the full data set, offer areas for faculty development, but also suggest important discipline-specific adaptations of the broad-based VALUE rubrics. Introduction: Why Faculty Beliefs Matter Communication and teamwork remain top-priority outcomes for engineering graduates in both academic and industry settings, and they are increasingly integrated into engineering curricula, not only through external course requirements (e.g. technical writing courses), but also within engineering courses. As Shuman et al. 1 argue in their landmark 2005 review of professional skills, both communication and teamwork can be effectively taught within engineering courses, and engineering education research is rich with discussions of both skills 2, 3-10 . Importantly, both skills have strong pedagogical research bases outside and inside engineering. Work on engineering communication as a domain within English dates back to the late 1800s, and technical communication has developed into an important subfield of writing studies. Moreover, recent engineering education literature contains numerous accounts of courses that address communication skills in engineering contexts. Work on teamwork is more recent, dating back to the 1950s, with more attention focused on the creation and function of effective teams than on the development of team skills in educational environments. Still, the engineering education literature again includes numerous accounts of strategies for incorporating teams into courses (particularly at the capstone level), along with multiple studies of engineering team dynamics. Despite the depth of research on both communication and teamwork, what remains unclear is the degree to which engineering faculty engage with and leverage this rich literature. With respect to communication, some researchers have explored differences in feedback patterns between engineering faculty and writing faculty 11, 12 or explored beliefs about writing among disciplinary faculty more generally 13, 14 , and the findings suggest both intersections and gaps between faculty with writing expertise and those with expertise in disciplinary content. But little research has considered the relationship between faculty beliefs about effective communication and broadly accepted criteria developed and published by scholars in writing and oral communication. Similarly, although research on assessing teamwork has been increasing in recent years 5, 15-18 , little work explores the degree to which faculty accept and/or apply criteria developed by teamwork researchers when teaching and evaluating student performance. We argue here that identifying both the intersections and the gaps between faculty beliefs and current research with respect to these two core skills is essential if we hope to provide more effective learning environments for students. Only by better understanding what faculty do believe about effective communication and effective teamwork can we more fully support those beliefs that are grounded in empirical research and address gaps or correct misconceptions. To do so, this paper explores the research following research question: How do faculty beliefs about effective communication and effective teamwork align with empirically based criteria for these two skills? As a first step toward this question, this paper presents preliminary findings from a larger mixed methods study exploring faculty and student beliefs about teamwork and communication. Background: What Does “Effective” Mean? As suggested above, questions of effectiveness for both communication and teamwork have been explored extensively by scholars from fields such as composition, rhetoric, writing studies, organizational behavior, industrial psychology, and many others. Within the narrower field of engineering education, work such as that by House et al. 19 provide useful evaluation rubrics for communication, while tools such as the Comprehensive Assessment for Team-Member Effectiveness (CATME) 16 offer criteria (as well as a web-based tool) for evaluating students’ performance on teams. In both cases, however, these engineering-specific rubrics, are grounded in the broader literature surrounding communication and teamwork, respectively. As a result, in considering a meaningful framework for analyzing faculty beliefs and comparing them to the existing bodies of literature, we turned to a larger national effort focused on the development of assessment rubrics for a range of general education outcomes – the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ (AACU) Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) project 20 . Focused on outcomes generally associated with liberal education, the VALUE project brought together faculty from AACU member institutions to develop a common set of rubrics for outcomes ranging from civic engagement to integrative learning to reading, including rubrics for oral communication, written communication, and teamwork. Each rubric provides an overall definition for the learning outcome and any key terms, and identifies benchmark, milestone, and capstone performance standards for specific, measurable criteria. Tested across universities and disciplines 21, 22 , the rubrics provide a useful set of common criteria to begin exploring how the beliefs and expectations of engineering faculty align with larger discussions around communication and teamwork. Table 1 lists the criteria for written communication and teamwork used in this analysis, and provides the definition for “Capstone” achievement, which serves as the preliminary definitions for our analysis (coding). Table 1: Written Communication and Teamwork Skills Analysis Capstone Achievement

Match or Mismatch: Engineering Faculty Beliefs about Communication and Teamwork versus Published Criteria

匹配或不匹配：工程学院对沟通和团队合作的信念与已发布的标准

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