Research Initiation: Leveling the Playing Field: Using Instructional Strategies to Address Disparities in Task Orientation for Women and Underrepresented Group

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Women and students of color are underrepresented in engineering undergraduate programs. Although there are many factors that contribute to underrepresentation, one of the consequences is that women and students of color potentially face an inhospitable climate in the dynamics of working in groups where majority culture dominates. Team-based projects are a common practice in mechanical engineering courses, and prior research suggests that engineering student design teams tend to divide tasks along gender-correlated lines, with women taking on more managerial and communications-related tasks and less design and fabrication tasks. This proposal focuses on "leveling the playing field" by understanding and addressing disparities in how tasks are divided within teams of students, with particular attention to how this relates to women and students of color. To do this, the project team proposes to evaluate the effectiveness of two potential interventions designed to ensure that all students have access to equal opportunities in group learning environments. The first intervention, called Individualized Design Experiences, provides all students with baseline skills and experience in design/fabrication tasks to enable them to more fully participate in these tasks when they are in team settings. The second intervention, Prescribed Roles, involves course instructors purposefully assigning students to complete specific tasks as part of a group project, with the intention of disrupting the task choices students might otherwise make. The effectiveness of these two interventions is studied by tracking individual students' contributions, their self-confidence, and their preference for particular roles in multiple, team-based engineering projects over multiple years. If these interventions are shown to be effective, this work will have the broader impact of improving gender and racial diversity within engineering undergraduate programs and expanding the talent pipeline within the engineering profession at large. The causes of underrepresentation of women and other underrepresented groups (defined as non-white, non-Asian) in undergraduate engineering programs are multifaceted. Both women and underrepresented groups potentially face an inhospitable climate where majority culture predominates in both implicit and explicit ways, including task orientation on team-based projects. Team-based projects are a common practice in mechanical engineering design courses, which is the setting for this proposed research study. Using a cohort-based concurrent triangulation mixed methods approach, our study addresses four research questions: (1) What factors best predict students' task choices on team-based design projects, including gender, race, and self-confidence? (2) To what extent do individual design experiences create more balanced task orientation in teams? (3) How do instructor prescribed roles affect task orientation? and (4) Do the effects of these two interventions persist after the treatment period? By providing structured educational interventions and studying their effects, the project team hopes to develop a model of instruction that can be transferred across engineering programs. In turn, this model can be used to drive professional development of engineering faculty.