2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background: This is a work-in-progress. A national (US) focus on broadening participation in engineering endeavors to increase the commonly reported bachelor’s degrees proportions of approximately 20% awarded to women and 30% awarded to minorities. One method to address this is by bringing teamwork into freshman courses. The community of practice established will engender feelings of belonging in students, motivating them to master the rigors of engineering content and enabling them to obtain a degree.
Purpose: This study strives to understand how an introductory course could affect the feelings of belonging in engineering by comparing several grouping strategies in freshman-level courses at a large southwestern public university.
Method: Several different ways to group students were used to create teams and the interactions were directly observed. Additionally, pre- and post- course surveys were administered. The same instructor was used to provide consistency and potentially allow for grouping strategy to account for any variations in feelings of belonging in engineering.
Results: The WIP results are thusly observational. Still, these are meaningful to the study by collecting team satisfaction data. Grouping strategy did not affect performance (e.g., grades) but did affect perception (e.g., opinion and belonging) for both males and females.
Conclusions: Theories of belonging and advantages of teamwork in technical field are used to enhance the scholarship of teaching, as well as to set the stage for the continuation of the study. Different grouping strategies are explained and compared. While any strategy is better than none, instructors should avoid single-female groups.