2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Diversity and inclusion are fundamental cornerstones in modern engineering education. Adopting a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives enhances the learning environment and fosters innovation. Inclusive engineering programs ensure that students from various ethnicities, genders, and socioeconomic backgrounds have equal opportunities to excel. According to a recent NSF report that was about Diversity in science and engineering education, the number of students from underrepresented minority groups who have earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering have increased by more 28.5% between 2011 and 2020. This increase in enrollment should be matched with a more inclusive and suitable learning environment for all students.
In engineering schools, typically students work in teams throughout the whole undergraduate period, tackling different problems and project types. In order to ensure that students get the most beneficial experience of being part of a team, and the maximum team performance, team formation needs to take different factors into account, with a very important one being how diverse the team is.
In this work-in-progress, the authors will evaluate the effectiveness of diversity on teams’ performance in engineering education at the school hosting this study. The courses under investigation will span first-year and sophomore students (more than 200 students), and by nature, students get divided into teams at the beginning of the semester and work on different projects, with the same team, until the end of the semester. The authors used CATME to divide the students into teams, taking into consideration different forms of diversity, such as gender, race, ethnicity, and background. While we end up with many diverse teams, some teams still end up being non-diverse. The authors are trying to answer the following research questions, 1) do diverse teams perform better than non-diverse teams in engineering education, 2) is there a team composition, in terms of how diverse the team is, that maximizes the team performance, and 3) ultimately, could the results obtained from this study drive a much bigger question of can we come up with a universal metric for engineering educators to measure teams’ performance.
Evaluation and assessment of this work will be done in two different aspects, quantitative and qualitative. For the earlier, team grades for the different projects will be collected, analyzed, and correlated with how diverse the team is. For the qualitative assessment, students were surveyed multiple times throughout the semester, using CATME Peer Evaluation, to capture their perspectives about their experience on being part of a diverse (or non-diverse) team. The authors will explore this feedback to answer questions 1 and 2. Finally, the authors will provide a set of best practices and summarize their experience for faculty who want to adopt this work.