Identifying Marginalization and Allying Tendencies to Transform Engineering Relationships

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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.