Identifying Marginalization and Allying Tendencies to Transform Engineering Relationships

团队合作是工程专业工作的关键。虽然帮助工科学生学习如何在团队中工作的某些方面得到了很好的理解，并被整合到教学工具中，但其他方面处理得很差，例如帮助团队学习如何解决团队成员之间的隐性和显性边缘化问题。就像在社会生活的其他领域一样，球队的队友可能会对其他队友，特别是那些来自代表性不足的人群的队友采取边缘化行为；这可能会损害团队的工作，并可能对被边缘化的个人造成损害。对于大型本科课程的讲师来说，尤其重要的是要有工具，使同辈或教官之间的边缘化能够在课堂上被识别出来，这样他们就可以中断队友之间的歧视或边缘化行为，并帮助队友学习如何在教练不在的时候打断其他人的边缘化行为。这将有助于学生更好地为多样化的工程劳动力做好准备。工作场所需要工程师共同努力，解决需要每个团队成员智力贡献的重要问题。因此，当队友排挤其他团队成员时，工程师需要知道如何自我纠正。教师和研究人员需要更深入地了解如何检测、管理和研究边缘化交互，以改善所有团队成员的团队体验。现有的关于团队合作的研究，即使是针对工科学生的研究，也倾向于关注队友报告的回溯性调查数据，而不是现场课堂观察。I-Matter(确定边缘化和联合倾向以改变工程关系)的目标是开发一个理论和经验为基础的框架和工具，以帮助大型课堂的教师识别参与边缘化行为的团队。这一框架和工具将通过对一所白人占多数的大学一年级大型工程课程的课堂观察、对代表不足的学生群体的采访、对教师的采访以及一项以来自代表不足的人群的学生制作的定性分析日记为特色的研究来开发。研究结果将被纳入一个供大班教师使用的观察工具中，并被纳入一个名为CATME的网络托管仪器的修改中，该仪器测量有效团队运作所必需的行为。一个经过实地测试的课堂观察仪器将提供一个研究基础设施和一个查明学生被怀疑被边缘化的方案，并将能够大规模改进工程学课程的同行评价。研究团队的多样化网络和CATME系统的广泛使用将促进研究的广泛传播，以影响教师支持扩大参与工程的目标。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Teamwork is critical to engineering professional work. While some aspects of helping engineering students learn how to work in teams are well understood and incorporated into instructional tools, others are poorly handled, such as helping teams learn how to address implicit and explicit marginalization amongst teammates. As in other areas of social life, teams can have teammates that engage in marginalizing behavior towards other teammates, particularly those from underrepresented populations; this can be detrimental to the work of the team and potentially damaging to the individuals being marginalized. It is particularly important for instructors of large undergraduate courses to have tools that will make peer-peer or instructor-peer marginalization identifiable at the classroom level so that they can interrupt discriminatory or marginalizing behavior amongst teammates, and to help teammates learn how to interrupt others' marginalizing behavior when instructors are not around. This will help better prepare students for a diverse engineering workforce. The workplace requires engineers to work together to solve important problems that need the intellectual contributions of each team member. Therefore, engineers need to know how to self-correct when teammates marginalize other team members. Instructors and researchers need better insights on how to detect, manage, and study marginalizing interactions to improve team experiences for all team members. Existing research on teamwork, even that focused on engineering students, has tended to focus on retrospective survey data reported by teammates, not live classroom observation. The goal of I-MATTER (Identifying Marginalization and Allying Tendencies to Transform Engineering Relationships) is to develop a theoretically and empirically grounded framework and tool to help instructors of large classrooms identify teams engaging in marginalizing behaviors. This framework and tool will be developed through classroom observation of large first-year engineering courses at a predominantly white university, interviews with groups of underrepresented students, interviews with instructors, and a study featuring qualitatively-analyzed diaries produced by students from underrepresented populations. Findings will be incorporated into an observation tool for instructors of large classes, and into a modification of a web-hosted instrument called CATME which measures behaviors necessary for effective team functioning. A field-tested instrument for classroom observation will provide a research infrastructure and a protocol for identifying suspected marginalization of students, and will enable large-scale improvements for peer evaluation in engineering courses. The diverse networks of the research team and the extensive use of the CATME system will facilitate widespread dissemination of the research to influence instructors to support the goal of broadening participation in engineering.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.