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

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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.