Assessing the Impact of Early Specialization on Learning and Development in Engineering Student Project Team

评估早期专业化对工程学生项目团队学习和发展的影响

• 批准号: 0536433
• 负责人: Linda Schmidt
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Maryland, College Park
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2006
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2006-07-15 至 2009-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0536433&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Assessing; Impact; Early; Specialization; Learning

Assessment/Research (91) The project team has become a well-established learning environment for engineering students. Engineering program accreditation reflects this by requiring "the ability to function on multidisciplinary teams." Graduates of engineering programs who enter the workforce are typically faced with a work environment that immediately requires team and interpersonal process skills. From the perspective of education, positive experiences in a project team can motivate students to perform at higher levels. Thus maximizing the impact of the team experience for undergraduate engineering students is a significant pedagogical goal. In an earlier NSF-supported pilot study (DUE 0243265) we investigated the consequences of overlooking an important set of team roles that tend to arise in student project teams. These are roles related to the accomplishment of the engineering project itself and require specific skills such as design (design specialist), construction ability (builder), report writing (technical writer), or computational expertise (number cruncher). These roles are distinguishable from the group process roles such as "leader" or "harmonizer," which largely impact group dynamics. These key technical team roles are "functional" and stand in contrast to the widely recognized process roles. This pilot study catalogued functional roles and attempted to determine their impact on team functioning and most importantly, student learning. One of the most significant findings of this pilot study was that engineering teams encourage a process of developing specialized skill roles for team members. This is generally unrecognized by faculty. The advantage of role specialization is efficiency in task completion and the development of expertise. The disadvantage is that many students do not even achieve minimum competence in some areas of content learning required by the course. The data from the pilot project revealed a model of intentional specialization on project teams to produce high quality team deliverables, and showed that team specialization increased as students progressed through their engineering curricula. This study is taking the next step in understanding the connection between functional role taking behavior and student learning in teams. In this work, we conceptualize role specialization as the development of "expertise." Using Alexander's Model of Domain Learning (MDL), this study is employing both qualitative focus group interviews and quantitative measures. We are also investigating the impact of role specialization on two important psychological attributes previously studied in the context of persistence in engineering: self and collective efficacy. Collective efficacy is the degree of confidence in the team's ability to the complete a task as a unit. A key question of interest is whether role specialization affects persistence in engineering? Intellectual Merit: This study is grounded in two educational psychological theories (Lent's Social Cognitive Career Theory and Alexander's Model of Domain Learning) and is focused on understanding specialization on student teams. Project findings can be expected to assist engineering educators in refining the structure of teams and assessment strategies for course projects with the goal of maximizing team strengths as informal learning communities in which subject matter mastery is developed. Broader Impacts: This research is contributing to the increased retention of students in engineering, improving the education of highly competent professional engineers entering the workforce, and improving the quality of student life of historically disenfranchised students.

评估/研究（91）项目团队已成为工程专业学生的良好学习环境。工程项目认证反映了这一点，要求“能够在多学科团队中发挥作用。“工程专业的毕业生进入劳动力市场通常面临着一个立即需要团队和人际处理技能的工作环境。从教育的角度来看，在项目团队中的积极经验可以激励学生在更高的水平上表现。因此，最大限度地提高团队经验的本科工程专业学生的影响是一个重要的教学目标。在早期的NSF支持的试点研究（DUE 0243265），我们调查的后果，忽视了一组重要的团队角色，往往出现在学生项目团队。这些角色与工程项目本身的完成相关，需要特定的技能，例如设计（设计专家）、施工能力（建筑商）、报告撰写（技术作家）或计算专业知识（数字运算）。这些角色与“领导者”或“协调者”等群体过程角色不同，后者在很大程度上影响了群体动态。这些关键的技术团队角色是“功能性的”，与广泛认可的过程角色形成对比。 这项试点研究编目功能的角色，并试图确定他们对团队运作的影响，最重要的是，学生的学习。这项试点研究最重要的发现之一是，工程团队鼓励团队成员发展专门技能的角色。这一点一般不为教师所知。角色专业化的优点是任务完成的效率和专业知识的发展。缺点是，许多学生甚至没有达到课程所要求的某些内容学习领域的最低能力。从试点项目的数据揭示了一个模型，故意专业化的项目团队，以产生高质量的团队交付成果，并显示团队专业化的学生通过他们的工程课程的进展。这项研究正在采取下一步了解功能性角色扮演行为和学生在团队中学习之间的联系。在这项工作中，我们将角色专业化概念化为“专业知识”的发展。本研究采用亚历山大的领域学习模型（MDL），采用定性焦点小组访谈和定量测量。我们还调查了角色专业化对先前在工程持久性背景下研究的两个重要心理属性的影响：自我和集体效能。集体效能是对团队作为一个整体完成任务的能力的信心程度。感兴趣的一个关键问题是角色专业化是否会影响工程的持久性？智力优势：本研究以两种教育心理学理论（伦特的社会认知职业理论和亚历山大的领域学习模型）为基础，重点是了解学生团队的专业化。 项目研究结果可以预期，以帮助工程教育工作者在完善团队的结构和课程项目的评估策略，以最大限度地发挥团队优势的非正式学习社区的目标，其中主题事项的掌握是发达国家。更广泛的影响：这项研究有助于提高工程专业学生的保留率，改善进入劳动力市场的高素质专业工程师的教育，并提高历史上被剥夺公民权的学生的学生生活质量。