2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 286: Formative Assessment of Equity and Inclusion in Student Teams

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

Formative assessment of equity and inclusion in student teams

Teamwork is both widely employed as a pedagogical tool and expected as an important learning outcome in engineering education. However, it cannot be assumed that students’ interactions within teams will always be constructive and positive experiences. Inequitable patterns of interaction can exclude individuals from participation, and reproduce existing structures and systems of race-based and gender-based marginalization that exist in wider society. Educational institutions should provide appropriate support to foster equitable and inclusive teamwork environments in order to maximize learning and affective outcomes for all students.

The authors present on a team support software tool designed to detect and respond to team behaviors and surface patterns of inequities, with interfaces for both students and faculty. The tool centers questions of equity and inclusion, and provides formative feedback to students in the form of tailored messages and instructional content, including graphs of data situating team ratings. The tool asks students to reflect on the messages and patterns that they see in their team, as well as to describe behaviors they might try next using strategies from motivational interviewing.

The National Science Foundation program for Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) awarded the authors a grant to support evaluating the effectiveness of this tool, both in terms of its ability to detect inequity and exclusion, and in terms of its interventions. In this short paper and associated poster we summarize some of this work. Specifically, we will present how we have operationalized “diverse” and “effective” teams, as well as how statistical measures of these variables are related to student outcomes, student identities, and team behaviors. We will highlight patterns in student responses showing, for example, relationships between lesson interventions and student ratings and how patterns in team ratings change over time. We will also present results of a scoping review synthesizing academic discourse around the notion of team equity. Forthcoming research projects will be described, including an initiative to explore instructors’ experiences with the software tool and the ways in which it assists their work to foster equitable teamwork.

Authors

Andrew Moffat http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2297-3914 University of Michigan [biography]

Andrew Moffat is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan, working with the Engineering Education Research Unit and Center for Academic Innovation on an NSF-funded project to assess the effectiveness of Tandem, an in-house software platform designed to support and nurture teamwork skills in undergraduate engineering students. Andrew has a background in education research and evaluation, having previously worked on a project at the University of Leeds, UK, evaluating an institution-wide curriculum transformation initiative. He holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Nottingham, UK, prior to the undertaking of which he spent a decade teaching English as a foreign language.
Dr. Robin Fowler http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6161-0986 University of Michigan [biography]

Robin Fowler is a Technical Communication lecturer and a Engineering Education researcher at the University of Michigan. Her teaching is primarily in team-based engineering courses, and her research focuses on equity in communication and collaboration as well as in group design decision making (judgment) under uncertainty. She is especially interested in how power relationships and rhetorical strategies affect group judgment in engineering design; one goal of this work is to to understand factors that inhibit full participation of students who identify with historically marginalized groups and investigate evidence-based strategies for mitigating these inequities. In addition, she is interested in technology and how specific affordances can change the ways we collaborate, learn, read, and write. Teaching engineering communication allows her to apply this work as she coaches students through collaboration, design thinking, and design communication. She is part of a team of faculty innovators who originated Tandem (tandem.ai.umich.edu), a tool designed to help facilitate equitable and inclusive teamwork environments.
Rebecca L Matz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8220-7720 University of Michigan [biography]

Becky Matz is a Research Scientist on the Research and Analytics team at the Center for Academic Innovation at the University of Michigan. She directs and supports research projects across Academic Innovation's portfolio of educational technologies. Her research expertise is in assessing the efficacy of software tools that support student learning and success, analyzing quantitative equity disparities in STEM courses across institutions, and developing interdisciplinary activities for introductory chemistry and biology courses. Matz holds a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Illinois and an M.S. in Educational Studies and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Michigan.
Miss Xiaping Li http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2620-1690 University of Michigan [biography]

Xiaping Li is a Ph.D. candidate in Engineering Education Research at the University of Michigan. Her research interests encompass faculty development and change, neurodiverse college student learning experiences and outcomes, international students in engineering, and cognitive sciences. She holds a B.S. in Hydrology and Water Resources Engineering and an M.S. in Geological Sciences.
Spencer JaQuay http://orcid.org/0009-0001-9572-7856 University of California, Irvine [biography]

I study how individual differences, teamwork, and language intersect to enhance collaboration and communication. My aim is to equip students with the skills they need to thrive in the workforce by leveraging the strength of diversity.
Madison Jeffrey http://orcid.org/0009-0009-3250-256X University of Michigan [biography]

Higher Education Graduate Intern
Mark Mills http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1145-9592 University of Michigan [biography]

Mark Mills (he/him) is a Data Scientist on the Research & Analytics team at University of Michigan’s Center for Academic Innovation. He directs and supports analytics across CAI’s portfolio of educational technologies. His experience is in prediction and classification of longitudinal and hierarchically cross-classified data structures such as students in courses measured over time.

Download paper (2.69 MB)

Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.

» Download paper

« View session