Assessing the Impact of Early Specialization on Learning and Development in Engineering Student Project Team

评估/研究（91）项目团队已成为工程专业学生良好的学习环境。工程项目认证通过要求“在多学科团队中发挥作用的能力”反映了这一点。工程专业的毕业生进入职场后，通常会面临一个需要团队合作和人际交往能力的工作环境。从教育的角度来看，在项目团队中的积极经验可以激励学生在更高的水平上表现。因此，最大化团队经验对本科工程专业学生的影响是一个重要的教学目标。在早期nsf支持的试点研究（DUE 0243265）中，我们调查了忽视学生项目团队中出现的一组重要团队角色的后果。这些角色与工程项目本身的完成相关，并且需要特定的技能，例如设计（设计专家），施工能力（建造者），报告写作（技术作家）或计算专业知识（数字分析者）。这些角色与“领导者”或“协调者”等群体过程角色不同，后者在很大程度上影响群体动态。这些关键的技术团队角色是“功能性的”，与广泛认可的过程角色形成对比。这项初步研究对功能角色进行了分类，并试图确定它们对团队功能的影响，最重要的是，对学生学习的影响。这个试点研究最重要的发现之一是，工程团队鼓励为团队成员开发专门技能角色的过程。这一点通常没有被教员认识到。角色专业化的优势在于任务完成的效率和专业知识的发展。缺点是，许多学生甚至没有达到最低限度的能力在某些领域的内容学习的课程要求。来自试点项目的数据揭示了项目团队有意专业化的模型，以产生高质量的团队可交付成果，并表明团队专业化随着学生在工程课程中的进步而增加。本研究在理解功能性角色扮演行为与学生团队学习之间的联系方面迈出了下一步。在这项工作中，我们将角色专业化概念化为“专业知识”的发展。本研究采用Alexander的领域学习模型（MDL），采用定性焦点小组访谈和定量测量相结合的方法。我们也在研究角色专业化对两个重要心理属性的影响，这两个重要心理属性之前在工程中的持久性背景下被研究过：自我和集体效能。集体效能是对团队作为一个单位完成一项任务的能力的信心程度。一个关键的问题是角色专业化是否会影响工程中的持久性？智力优势：本研究以两种教育心理学理论（Lent的社会认知职业理论和Alexander的领域学习模型）为基础，着重于理解学生团队的专业化。项目发现可以帮助工程教育工作者提炼团队的结构和课程项目的评估策略，目标是最大限度地发挥团队的力量，在非正式的学习社区中，对主题的掌握得到发展。更广泛的影响：这项研究有助于增加工程专业学生的保留率，改善进入劳动力市场的高素质专业工程师的教育，并改善历史上被剥夺权利的学生的学生生活质量。

Assessment/Research (91) The project team has become a well-established learning environment for engineering students. Engineering program accreditation reflects this by requiring "the ability to function on multidisciplinary teams." Graduates of engineering programs who enter the workforce are typically faced with a work environment that immediately requires team and interpersonal process skills. From the perspective of education, positive experiences in a project team can motivate students to perform at higher levels. Thus maximizing the impact of the team experience for undergraduate engineering students is a significant pedagogical goal. In an earlier NSF-supported pilot study (DUE 0243265) we investigated the consequences of overlooking an important set of team roles that tend to arise in student project teams. These are roles related to the accomplishment of the engineering project itself and require specific skills such as design (design specialist), construction ability (builder), report writing (technical writer), or computational expertise (number cruncher). These roles are distinguishable from the group process roles such as "leader" or "harmonizer," which largely impact group dynamics. These key technical team roles are "functional" and stand in contrast to the widely recognized process roles. This pilot study catalogued functional roles and attempted to determine their impact on team functioning and most importantly, student learning. One of the most significant findings of this pilot study was that engineering teams encourage a process of developing specialized skill roles for team members. This is generally unrecognized by faculty. The advantage of role specialization is efficiency in task completion and the development of expertise. The disadvantage is that many students do not even achieve minimum competence in some areas of content learning required by the course. The data from the pilot project revealed a model of intentional specialization on project teams to produce high quality team deliverables, and showed that team specialization increased as students progressed through their engineering curricula. This study is taking the next step in understanding the connection between functional role taking behavior and student learning in teams. In this work, we conceptualize role specialization as the development of "expertise." Using Alexander's Model of Domain Learning (MDL), this study is employing both qualitative focus group interviews and quantitative measures. We are also investigating the impact of role specialization on two important psychological attributes previously studied in the context of persistence in engineering: self and collective efficacy. Collective efficacy is the degree of confidence in the team's ability to the complete a task as a unit. A key question of interest is whether role specialization affects persistence in engineering? Intellectual Merit: This study is grounded in two educational psychological theories (Lent's Social Cognitive Career Theory and Alexander's Model of Domain Learning) and is focused on understanding specialization on student teams. Project findings can be expected to assist engineering educators in refining the structure of teams and assessment strategies for course projects with the goal of maximizing team strengths as informal learning communities in which subject matter mastery is developed. Broader Impacts: This research is contributing to the increased retention of students in engineering, improving the education of highly competent professional engineers entering the workforce, and improving the quality of student life of historically disenfranchised students.