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的认同感有多强，并作为在工程中坚持不懈和保持的指标。该项目通过调查工科本科生的团队合作如何解释或被EI解释，并支持一个从事工程教育研究的新研究人员社区，与工程形成研究项目的研究启动计划的目标保持一致。工程雇主和教育认证机构一再呼吁在本科教育中强调团队合作培训。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，关于团队合作如何影响不同背景的学生的EI，或被EI告知的情况，我们知之甚少。基于团队的经验和工程认同感之间的联系有助于包容性教学和学习，因为对于一些学生来说，EI可能低得不成比例。此外，没有考虑EI的团队合作可能会进一步加剧这种差距。尽管越来越多来自不同背景的学生进入工程项目，但他们在成绩预期、资源获取和同行互动方面面临的挑战仍然阻碍了他们的留住和晋升。在大学背景下，这些挑战最明显地体现在学生团队中。这项资助将：(1)通过团队成员的行为和团队成员之间的分歧模式来分析团队合作经验；以及(2)评估团队合作是如何影响EI的。分歧模式将通过团队成员对基本团队结构(任务、过程、满意度、凝聚力和关系)的看法的差异来描述。本项目将以分散理论为基础，采用混合方法来理解流行和分歧模式，阐明EI、性别和其他特定学生变量(人口统计数据、转学学生等)是如何发生变化的。解释学生在任务、流程和其他团队合作结构上存在分歧的可能性。这些结果有可能揭示差距或股权问题。此外，通过利用已通过NSF资助的先前工作测试的调查工具，该项目将通过行为和分歧模式的镜头来探索团队合作经验如何与EI相关。因此，当团队合作中出现分歧时，提供证据说明哪些行为与更强的EI有关，以及哪些类型的团队动力(不一致模式)促进EI的发展。该项目将开发一个更健壮的模型，以有效地处理EI上的Likert风格的变量。它解决了预计将塑造包容性团队合作设计和干预的未来工作的新问题，同时说明了使用新模型和在开放源码程序中编写的代码以促进传播在估计准确性方面的收益。这个项目将使三名职业生涯早期和中期的教职员工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学习或教学努力。这项工作将在一所为拉美裔服务的机构进行，在那里，课程的改进和学生在基于团队的课程工作中的经验将为不同的学生群体带来更好的学习体验。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。

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.