Award Abstract # 2106322
Research Initiation: Understanding Teamwork Experience and its Linkage to Engineering Identity of Diverse Students

NSF Org: EEC
Division of Engineering Education and Centers
Recipient: SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY
Initial Amendment Date: July 1, 2021
Latest Amendment Date: July 1, 2021
Award Number: 2106322
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Alice Pawley
apawley@nsf.gov
 (703)292-7286
EEC
 Division of Engineering Education and Centers
ENG
 Directorate for Engineering
Start Date: July 15, 2021
End Date: June 30, 2024 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $199,919.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $199,919.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2021 = $199,919.00
History of Investigator:
  • Yiyi Wang (Principal Investigator)
    yiyiwang@sfsu.edu
  • Stephanie Claussen (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Xiaorong Zhang (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Fatemeh Khalkhal (Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: San Francisco State University
1600 HOLLOWAY AVE
SAN FRANCISCO
CA  US  94132-1740
(415)338-7090
Sponsor Congressional District: 11
Primary Place of Performance: San Francisco State University
1600 Holloway Ave
San Francisco
CA  US  94132-1722
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
11
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): F4SLJ5WF59F6
Parent UEI: JW7YN4NDAHC1
NSF Program(s): EngEd-Engineering Education
Primary Program Source: 01002122DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 110E, 1340
Program Element Code(s): 134000
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.041

ABSTRACT

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.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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Claussen, S and Khalkhal, F and Zhang, X and Biviano, AK and Wang, Y "Qualitative analysis of the relationships between the teamwork experiences of diverse students and their engineering identities at a Hispanic-serving institution" , 2023 Citation Details
Wang, Y and Claussen, S and Zhang, X and Khalkhal, F "Development and initial outcomes of an NSF RIEF project in understanding teamwork experience and its linkage to engineering identity of diverse students" , 2023 Citation Details
Zhang, Xiaorong and Claussen, Stephanie and Khalkhal, Fatemeh and Wang, Yiyi "Evaluating ChatGPTs Efficacy in Qualitative Analysis of Engineering Education Research" , 2024 Citation Details

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

This research found preliminary evidence connecting student’s engineering identity to their teamwork experience. The latter is portrayed by the behaviors they use and the frequency and types of disagreement they have during teamwork. While many studies have looked at how teamwork influences engineering identity, no study as far as we know cast teamwork into the level of details with a diverse student body at a Hispanic-serving institution like ours. Doing that enables us to identify the nuanced connections between engineering identity and teamwork. Key findings are summarized below:

 

a.     We find that team disagreement (i.e., conflict) is uncommon in students teamwork. However, task and process conflicts during students teamwork could easily slip into relationship conflict, as shown by practically and statistically significant Spearman’s coefficients in our data, possibly implying a lack of conflict management skills amongst the students. This inability to engage in meaningful disagreement could lead to rupture and tension in teams (Leslie 2020).

b.     We also find that engineering identity is intertwined with the behaviors students use during teamwork. Students who perceive themselves as capable (i.e., self-efficacy) tend to function more positively in all behavior metrics. When students feel that their professors, peers and parents see them as a good engineer, they function more positively in all behavior metrics except interacting with teammates.

c.      Our work reveals, for the first time, that students’ engineering identity is connected to not just how they function but also how they disagree during teamwork. Based on the quantitative data analysis, teams tend to suffer less relationship tension when members possess higher engineering identity in terms of their competence/performance (construed as the self-efficacy dimension of engineering identity). During the qualitative analysis of interview transcripts, a theme emerged showing that their engineering identities grew when they were able to disagree with their team about task and process.

In summary, this research provides both quantitative and qualitative evidence suggesting the linkage between engineering identity and teamwork experience. The results inform future directions to build impactful teamwork experience, forging engineering identity in socio-economically diverse students.

 


Last Modified: 01/04/2025
Modified by: Yiyi Wang

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