2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This complete evidence-based practice paper will describe the lessons learned through implementation of equitable teaming materials in a first-year general engineering program at a large mid-Atlantic land grant university. In this program, students are expected to develop professional teamwork skills in an engineering setting by working on projects with a semester-long team. The importance of a sense of belonging for first-year students has also been shown to be a factor in retention and success in an engineering program, which can be influenced by experiences in team projects. Many instructors have observed that incoming first-year students often struggle with teamwork, and several instructors from the program attended a workshop in Summer 2022 led by another institution with lengthy experience leading project-based learning first-year engineering courses. In this program, the program leaders facilitated workshops for participants which included providing course activities to help foster equitable teaming practices in a project based learning setting. These tools had previously been implemented in a program at a smaller institution; this paper explores the challenges and successes of integrating them at a larger scale.
Instructors who participated in the summer program have a degree of autonomy in how they approach teamwork in their courses, and implemented equitable teaming tools to various degrees in their classes in Fall 2022 semester. The teaming tools included pre-readings related to the importance of diversity on teams, individual asset maps encouraging students to explore how their own backgrounds could be applied in the course, team asset maps designed to facilitate a breakdown of work for team assignments in a way that drew on the diverse backgrounds of team members, and team processing documents guiding students through reflective questions on their team’s strengths and areas to grow.
This paper is based on data collected from student reflections and assignments during the semester related to their views of teamwork and the importance of diversity on engineering teams, as well as the experiences of the instructors for the classes where the team projects took place. The students’ perceptions of teamwork were analyzed from the perspective of their sense of psychological safety in their teams. Psychological safety has been shown to be an important indicator of the effectiveness of teams in engineering and other disciplines (Cole et al, 2022) (Edmonson, 1999).
We anticipate the results of this study to show that integrating the equitable teaming practices into the semester project helped facilitate meaningful teamwork conversations related to equity that may not have been present using more traditional methods previously used in the course. Using all of the tools can occupy a significant amount of class time throughout the semester, but it is anticipated that the results of the study will show that they helped students recognize the value of equitable teamwork and creating a psychologically safe space as part of a successful engineering project.