PGE/RES: Enhancing Women's Experiences with Teamwork in Technical Writing and Computing Environments

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The University of Louisville will examine the experiences of over 400 students working on team projects in scientific and technical writing and computer science classes over three semesters. The results of this study should provide technical writing and computer science instructors and researchers with new insights into the different communication styles and values of male and female students, new information about differences in the epistemological styles of men and women and how these affect teamwork experiences, empirical data on the effectiveness of a variety of workshop interventions for improving teamwork experiences, and extensively-tested materials suitable for inclusion in a textbook or CD-ROM on teamwork.Teamwork and collaboration are often proposed as ways to augment the experiences of female students in SMET disciplines. However, in practice, women frequently have negative experiences with team projects that leave them feeling even more alienated than before. Men and women often conflict over their preferences for different types of communication and problem-solving styles, and these conflicts often result in women's silence and frustration. Such silence is harmful not only because women lose out on opportunities to contribute to the project, but also because their silence is often perceived by others as insecurity over their technical competence.In the first research phase, six to ten teams working on technically-oriented writing projects will be observed in detail. Data collection will consist of field notes, video recordings, and written documents. In addition, students will complete questionnaires assessing their attitudes towards teamwork and their favored epistemological styles (i.e., attitudes toward knowledge and authority). Relationships have been found between gender, the ability to manage conflict, and epistemological styles. Team interactions will be transcribed and analyzed for quantity of interaction, interruptions, roles played by different individuals, reactions to different types of conversational interchanges, and different approaches to problem-solving. These analyses will be compared against the questionnaire data to assess how communication, problem-solving, and knowledge styles can affect men and women's experiences in teams.The next phase of the project will draw upon these taped interactions to produce materials that will be used in workshops designed to enhance the team experience. Four different workshops will be compared for effectiveness: (1) analyzing tapes of team interactions; (2) analyzing transcripts of team interactions; (3) analyzing tapes of team interactions followed by role-playing activities; (4) listening to a lecture. It is hypothesized that analyzing the annotated transcripts of team interactions will be the most effective workshop intervention and the lecture will be the least effective.