Research Initiation: Understanding Teamwork Experience and its Linkage to Engineering Identity of Diverse Students

这个项目的重点是工程师身份（EI），它衡量一个人对工程师身份的认同程度，并作为工程师持久性和保留的指标。该项目是通过调查团队合作如何解释或由EI解释本科工程专业学生，并支持新的研究人员进行工程教育研究的社区的研究启动工程形成计划的目标。工程雇主和教育认证机构一再呼吁强调本科教育中的团队合作培训。这种强调导致了关于团队合作如何促进元认知能力，沟通和相关技能的研究激增。然而，少有人知道团队合作如何通知或通知来自不同背景的学生的EI。基于团队的经验和工程身份之间的联系是有助于包容性的教学和学习，因为EI可能是不成比例地降低一些学生。此外，在设计团队时不考虑EI可能会进一步加剧这一差距。虽然越来越多来自不同背景的学生正在进入工程专业，但他们在绩效期望、资源获取和同伴互动方面面临的挑战仍然阻碍着他们的保留和发展。在大学环境中，这些挑战在学生团队中表现得最为明显。这笔赠款将：（1）通过具有高度社会和经济多样性的学生群体中团队成员的行为和分歧模式分析团队合作经验;（2）评估团队合作如何影响EI。团队成员对基本团队结构（任务、过程、满意度、凝聚力和关系）的看法差异将描述分歧模式。本项目将以离散理论为基础，采用混合方法来理解普遍性和分歧模式，阐明情绪智力、性别和其他学生特定变量（人口统计学、转学生等）如何影响团队成员的分歧模式。解释学生在任务、流程和其他团队合作结构上不同意的可能性。结果有可能揭示差距或公平问题。此外，通过利用调查工具，已经测试了以前的NSF资助的工作，本项目将探讨如何团队合作的经验，通过行为和分歧模式的透镜，涉及到EI。因此，提供证据表明，哪些行为与更强的EI和哪些类型的团队动力学（分歧模式）促进EI发展时，团队合作中出现分歧。该项目将开发一个更强大的模型，以有效地处理EI上的Likert风格变量。它解决了新的问题，预计将塑造包容性的团队合作设计和干预措施的未来工作，同时阐明了估计准确性的收益，由于使用新的模型与代码编写的开源程序，以促进传播。这个项目将使三位早期和中期职业教师熟悉工程教育研究的新方法。通过利用团队合作经验来加强不同学生的EI，他们将能够将这项研究扩展到许多包容性的学习或教学工作。这项工作将发生在一个西班牙裔服务机构，在那里的课程和学生的经验，以团队为基础的课程工作的改进将导致改善学习经验，为一个多元化的学生body.This奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

This project focuses on engineering identity (EI), which measures how strongly a person identifies with being an engineer and serves as an indicator of persistence and retention in engineering. The project is aligned with the goals of the Research Initiation in Engineering Formation program by investigating how teamwork explains or is explained by EI among undergraduate engineering students and to support a community of new researchers conducting engineering education research. Repeated calls from engineering employers and educational accreditation bodies have stressed teamwork training in undergraduate education. This emphasis has led to a proliferation of studies on how teamwork promotes metacognitive ability, communication, and related skills. However, less is known about how teamwork informs or is informed by the EI of students from diverse backgrounds. The connection between team-based experiences and engineering identity is instrumental to inclusive teaching and learning because EI may be disproportionately lower for some students. In addition, teamwork designed without considering EI may further exacerbate that gap. Although more students from diverse backgrounds are entering engineering programs, the challenges they face in performance expectations, resource access, and peer interactions still hamper their retention and advancement. In a university context, these challenges are most clearly manifested in student teams. This grant will: (1) analyze teamwork experience through the behaviors of and disagreement patterns between team members in a student population with high social and economic diversity; and (2) evaluate how teamwork informs EI. Disagreement patterns will be depicted by the variation in team members’ views on basic team constructs (task, process, satisfaction, cohesion, and relationship).Grounded in dispersion theory, this project will employ a mixed-methods approach to understand the prevalence and disagreement patterns, illuminating how EI, gender, and other student-specific variables (demographics, transfer student, etc.) explain the likelihood of a student to disagree on tasks, process, and other teamwork constructs. The results have the potential to reveal gaps or equity issues. Moreover, by leveraging survey instruments that have been tested by prior NSF-funded work, this project will explore how teamwork experience, via a lens of behaviors and disagreement pattern, relate to EI. Thus, providing evidence on which behaviors are linked to stronger EI and which types of team dynamics (disagreement patterns) promote EI development when a disagreement occurs in teamwork. The project will develop a more robust model to effectively handle Likert-style variables on EI. It addresses new questions that are expected to shape future work on inclusive teamwork design and interventions, while illuminating the gains in estimation accuracy as a result of the use of the new model with codes written in an open-source program to facilitate dissemination. This project will acquaint three early- and mid-career faculty members with new methods in engineering education research. By leveraging teamwork experiences to strengthen the EI of diverse students, they will be able extend this research to many inclusive learning or teaching endeavors. This work will take place at a Hispanic-serving institution, where improvements in the curriculum and student experience in team-based coursework will lead to improved learning experiences for a diverse student body.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.