Collaborative Research: Building Supports for Diversity through Engineering Teams

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Developing students who can work effectively in cross-cultural teams is an important part of engineering education. In our increasingly global economy, students must be adequately prepared to meet the demands of the engineering workforce. However, many students do not have international exposure prior to college or the experience of interacting with others from a variety of backgrounds. As such, understanding how to improve team interactions within culturally diverse groups can provide novel opportunities for students to more deeply appreciate differences in engineering teams while simultaneously deepening their understanding of engineering concepts. This project is focused on how students participate in diverse engineering teams in first-year courses and how their participation impacts students' multicultural effectiveness and diversity sensitivity. Multicultural effectiveness and diversity sensitivity have been shown to help achieve a common group identity that is essential to effective teams. This project is motivated by two broader goals in the engineering education community and promoted by ABET which are complementary: 1) to graduate students with an ability to function on multidisciplinary teams and 2) to give students the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions globally. Understanding the experiences of students engaging in engineering design and the resulting shifts in attitudes will help identify practical ways to increase students' understanding and appreciation of people from diverse backgrounds. These interventions may change the culture of engineering at these institutions to make it more inclusive of underrepresented students. This project is supported by the Research in Engineering Education program and the EHR Core Research (ECR) program, specifically the ECR Research in Disabilities Education area of special interest. ECR emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. This research project contributes to foundational knowledge about broadening participation in STEM. This sequential explanatory mixed methods study will address the gap in the current literature to understand how students interact in diverse teams. Student demographic data will include race, ethnicity, gender, disability and other information to be used as variables in the data analyses and interpretations of the findings. The first phase of research will quantitatively measure effects of diverse team formation on diversity sensitivity and multicultural effectiveness. A baseline survey of student attitudes will be collected at the beginning of their first-year engineering class before students are grouped into teams. Students will be grouped into diverse teams via the Comprehensive Assessment for Team Member Effectiveness (CATME) and surveyed mid- and end-semester to track changes in diversity sensitivity and multicultural effectiveness based on team composition using time series structural equation modeling. Additionally, social network analysis will be used to understand how students work within and outside of their assigned teams on engineering tasks to identify boundary crossing individuals within engineering. Finally, multiple streams of data will be collected on team interactions during engineering tasks (audio recording, video recording, observation, and work products). The second phase of research will conduct interpretative phenomenological interviews with students to understand students' experiences working in diverse teams. Students participating in interviews will also be asked to complete Implicit Association Tests to elicit in-group preferences. The use of interpretative phenomenological interviews allows for the creation of understanding through the analysis of students' lived experiences while still allowing the researcher to leverage understanding from existing literature. This qualitative methodology allows us to successfully transfer interpretive results beyond the bounds of this work to advance the conversations around diverse teaming in engineering. By combining the methodologies outlined in this work we can identify members of the community who are made "out-group" members by their peers and empirically understand the practices of individuals that drive the creation of out-groups and these students' experiences in engineering teaming environments. The findings of this work can have significant impact in how students are grouped and taught within engineering teams, which can improve students' experiences to make engineering more inclusive and teaming skills more effective.