Testing the Effectiveness of a Digital Tool, Tandem, in Assessing and Supporting Inclusive and Equitable Teamwork in Engineering

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This project aims to serve the national interest by improving how teamwork in introductory engineering courses is assessed and supported, with specific focus on equity and inclusion. Learning how to work effectively in a team is clearly an important goal for preparing undergraduate engineering students. However, supporting inclusive teamwork remains challenging. Marginalization on teams has been linked to aspects of students’ social identity, such as identifying as a woman or person of color. It can take a variety of forms, including ideas going unheard or being pushed into more menial tasks. Particularly in introductory courses and at large colleges and universities, engineering instructors face the additional hurdle of having many students and student teams. With these compounding factors, it is difficult for instructors, and even students themselves, to be aware in real-time when inequitable behaviors are occurring on their teams, and to know how to address them. The consequences of inequitable teams are serious, leading to inequities in mastery experiences and ultimately contributing to students leaving engineering degree programs. To address this problem, this project introduces a digital pedagogical tool, called Tandem. Tandem holds promise for disrupting inequitable team behaviors. Developed at the University of Michigan, Tandem is a multi-faceted tool for course teams that delivers tailored lessons to students about effective teamwork. The tool provides feedback to students and instructors about how teams are doing. The objective of this project is to study the effectiveness of Tandem in assessing and supporting inclusive and equitable teamwork in engineering. This project seeks to improve the diversity of students that participate in engineering as well as improve novel educational tools. Further, the project will address two components of the research agenda outlined in the National Research Council’s discipline-based education research report. This includes conducting research that: 1) seeks to understand similarities and differences between student groups that differ by, for example, gender and race/ethnicity; and 2) goes beyond assessing gains in conceptual understanding by focusing on outcomes associated with affective dimensions of learning. Using mixed method study designs, this project will address the overall objective through the following research questions: 1) In what ways can Tandem be used to observe inclusive and equitable teamwork in engineering? And 2) In what ways can Tandem be used to support more inclusive and equitable teamwork in engineering? While Tandem is currently being used across a range of courses at the University of Michigan, the scope of the project will be limited to Engineering 100, the cornerstone first-year engineering design course. Engineering 100 is a useful context in part because small differences in teamwork experiences early in a student’s college coursework can be magnified in subsequent team project experiences and because the first and second years in college are considered the most impactful in terms of retention and persistence of STEM majors. Key data sources include data from student surveys and responses to lessons collected throughout the term in Tandem, student interviews, and observations of engineering student teams during class meetings. The expected outcomes from this work include 1) generalizable knowledge about an approach to measuring teamwork competency that emphasizes inclusion and equity and fosters instructor and student awareness of inequitable team behavior, 2) improvements to survey and lesson features within Tandem that will support the ability of teams to behave inclusively, and 3) improved pedagogical practice in this engineering course context. The positive impacts of this project will be further propagated through the use of Tandem in other team-based courses at the University of Michigan as well as at other institutions. This project has transformative potential in the tailored support that Tandem can provide to instructors and students in recognizing and addressing inequitable behavior in teams and promoting conditions in which all can be successful. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.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.