2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This research paper discusses an emerging project that 1) seeks to gather validity evidence for a survey of engineering student teaming attitudes and skill development and 2) identifies what skills and attitudes engineering students develop over time and to what degree.

Given teamwork’s importance in engineering education and practice, the skill is essential for engineering students to learn. ABET (2023) states that teams “consist of more than one person working toward a common goal and should include individuals of diverse backgrounds, skills, or perspectives.” According to ABET Criterion 3, an effective team includes “members [who] together provide leadership, create a collaborative and inclusive environment, establish goals, plan tasks, and meet objectives.” As we have explored the teamwork literature, we have identified that teamwork, as the discipline has defined it, lacks specificity , thus leaving open the criterion for assessment. This project emerged as an opportunity to both “measure” and precisely define teamwork skills and attitudes.

In the summer/fall of 2023, we developed a pilot survey of engineering teaming attitudes and skills and administered it at two mid-Atlantic institutions. The survey was given in both in- and out-of-class contexts. Items relating to many attitudes (e.g., identity, motivation, belonging, etc.) with strong validity with engineering students were taken as-is from a project Studying Underlying Characteristics of Computing and Engineering Student Success (SUCCESS) developed by Berger et al. (2018), some of which were specifically adapted to the teaming environment (e.g. gratitude was changed to gratitude towards teaming). Other items included other factors with strong validity evidence such as patience (non-engineering; adapted from Schnitker, 2012), engineering team conflict and roles (unpublished, work by Kirn, Godwin, and colleagues), leadership (non-engineering; adapted from Wielkiewicz et al., 2000), and perceptions of inclusion and discrimination in engineering (Bahnson et al., 2022). We also collected demographics using Fernandez and colleagues' (2016) recommendations for inclusive survey design, expanding options to be more representative of additional socioeconomic backgrounds and neurodivergence. Finally, we asked students to answer qualitative questions to gather initial content validity for our items and factors and to add context to our findings.

Survey administration ended in early October 2023, and validity analyses are underway. Our pilot administration led to a sample size of n=606 with representation across years, discipline, race/ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic background, (dis)ability and neurodivergence identities, military background, and sexual orientation. Our validity work, given our small sample size, focused on factors that we have newly adapted to our context or engineering altogether. This paper focuses on exploratory factor analysis. We used parallel analysis to determine the number of factors present across our items, followed by exploratory factor analysis to identify those factors and their makeup. In this paper, we will share our present findings and our future plans.