Track 2: Assessing Student Satisfaction and Engagement in Teams (ASSET): An Empirical Review and Scale Development

先前的研究表明，群体差异（如性别、种族/民族和学科）会影响学生对课程互动（如团队合作）的看法。这些差异可能导致团队经验、学生参与和不同学生群体学习的不平等。更好地理解这些差异，为所有工程和其他学科的学生提供更好的学习体验，有助于美国国家科学基金会扩大工程参与计划的目标、工程领域和整个社会。该项目将确定如何观察这些差异，为教师提供解释这些差异的指导，并确定预防、减少和纠正潜在负面结果的策略。通过研究一系列学科的团队组成、评级模式、团队流程和结果，该团队将确定STEM学科甚至特定工程学科独有或更普遍的模式，以及它们对学生参与度的影响。研究人员将创建一种新的调查工具来衡量参与度，这将使教师能够衡量课程层面干预的有效性，以优化他们的教学，从而为所有学生带来更积极、更公平的团队和课程体验。它还将允许教师识别和帮助那些参与度较低或团队经验较差的学生。研究团队将探讨学生的团队经历如何根据性别，种族/民族，种族/民族和性别的交集，英语语言技能，班级水平（例如一年级学生，高年级学生）和专业（包括工程子学科）而有所不同。该团队将首先检查来自不同小组的学生如何体验团队过程，包括任务、关系和过程冲突、心理安全、信任、凝聚力、满意度、团队可行性（未来合作的意愿）和同伴评估。这将使用CATME（一个由NSF支持开发的系统）收集的大量数据来完成，这些数据来自2,566所院校的超过23,000名教师的180多万名学生，历时17年。项目团队将利用系统的现有数据和从大型、多机构、多学科用户群收集新数据的能力。这将使我们能够检查潜在的系统人口统计学或学科差异，不同群体的学生如何体验团队工作和团队过程。该项目的第二个贡献是开发并验证了一种直接衡量学生参与度的方法，该方法评估了参与度的三个方面，这三个方面被反复发现很重要：身体、认知和情感。现有的学生参与度衡量标准侧重于外部条件或参与度的替代概念，并不适合研究学生的团队体验如何影响他们对教育的身体、认知和情感参与度。将开发一种心理测量学上合理的学生参与度测量方法，这将有助于研究教学创新的影响，包括针对团队合作的创新。这项工作的最后一个贡献将是研究学生参与与团队过程、学生未来合作的意愿、学生团队贡献的同伴评分之间的关系，以及这些关系的性质如何因不同的学生群体而变化。项目团队将收集新的数据来分析这些关系，利用CATME在大招生班级中使用的成果来管理这些措施。结果将提供规范参考数据，作为教师和研究人员在团队过程、同伴评分和学生参与方面的群体差异的知识库；以及不同人口群体的学生参与的相关关系。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Prior research suggests that group differences, such as gender, race/ethnicity, and academic discipline influence the way that students perceive course interactions such as teamwork. These differences may lead to inequities in team experiences, student engagement, and learning for different groups of students. It is helpful to the aims of NSF’s Broadening Participation in Engineering program, to the field of engineering, and to society as a whole to better understand these differences to provide better learning experiences for all students in engineering and other disciplines. This project will identify how these differences may be observed, provide instructors guidance in interpreting those differences, and identify strategies to prevent, reduce, and remediate potential negative outcomes. By studying team composition, rating patterns, and team processes and outcomes across a range of academic disciplines, the team will identify patterns that are unique to, or more prevalent in, STEM disciplines or even specific engineering disciplines and their impact on student engagement. Researchers will create a new survey instrument to measure engagement that will enable faculty to measure the effectiveness of course-level interventions to optimize their teaching resulting in more positive and equitable team and course experiences for all students. It will also allow instructors to identify and assist students who are less engaged or having poor team experiences.The research team will explore how students’ team experiences may differ based on gender, race/ethnicity, and the intersection of race/ethnicity and gender, English language skills, class level (e.g. first-year students, seniors), and major (including sub-disciplines in engineering). The team will begin by examining how students from different groups experience team processes including task, relationship, and process conflict, psychological safety, trust, cohesion, satisfaction, team viability (willingness to work together in the future), and peer evaluations. This will be accomplished using a large volume of data collected through CATME (a system developed with NSF support) over a 17-year period from over 1.8 million unique students of over 23,000 instructors at 2,566 institutions. The project team will leverage the system’s existing data and ability to collect new data from a large, multi-institutional, multidisciplinary user base. This will enable us to examine potential systematic demographic or disciplinary differences in how different groups of students experience team work and team processes. A second contribution of this project is to develop and validate a direct measure of student engagement that assesses the three aspects of engagement that have been repeatedly found to matter: physical, cognitive, and affective. Existing measures of student engagement that focus on external conditions or alternate conceptualizations of engagement are not well-suited to examine how students’ team experiences affect their physical, cognitive, and affective engagement with their education. A psychometrically sound measure of student engagement will be developed that will be useful in studying the impact of pedagogical innovations, including innovations addressing teamwork. A final contribution of the proposed work will be to examine how student engagement is related to team processes, students’ willingness to work together in the future, and peer ratings of students’ teamwork contributions, as well as how the nature of those relationships may vary for different groups of students. The project team will collect new data to analyze these relationships, leveraging the efforts of CATME’s use in large-enrollment classes to administer the measures. The results will provide norm-referenced data to serve as a knowledge base for instructors and researchers about group differences in team processes, peer ratings, and student engagement; and the correlates of student engagement for different demographic groups.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.