2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this Complete Research Paper, we compare how novice and experienced near-peer mentors (NPMs) for a large (ca. 650-student) introductory engineering design course used questions and signaled support during a one-on-one simulated discussion with a student avatar who was experiencing logistical issues on a design team.

The course, taken by all engineering majors at the university, involves a semester-long, team-based design project. The 28 NPMs for the course each manage five teams of five students, review Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness (CATME) peer evaluations, and hold weekly discussion sessions. These NPMs are well-positioned to identify, investigate, and help remedy team conflicts.

Our work focuses on engagement-related conflict in which a team member is perceived to not be engaging in the team’s work as much as others expect. These conflicts may arise from one or more team members experiencing logistical issues (e.g., making it difficult to attend team meetings); feeling marginalized by others; or being disinterested in engineering or the course.

In our prior work, we created a simulation scenario to explore how NPMs might begin to investigate team conflict based on a CATME report. We used the simulation platform, Mursion®, which allows for Zoom-based verbal discussions with an avatar. The avatar is played by a highly trained actor called a sim. The present study uses the avatar, Ciara. We developed materials to (a) help the NPM prepare for the discussion and (b) prepare the sim to respond consistently across NPMs, albeit not in a scripted fashion. The sim materials make clear that Ciara is facing logistical issues as a commuting student who cannot attend last-minute meetings; such meetings are outside of the agreed upon team norms.

Participants in the present study included 12 experienced NPMs and 9 novice NPMs. At the time of data collection, all 12 experienced NPMs had completed service as an NPM in one or more design courses while the 9 novice NPMs were serving as an NPM for the first time. All study participants were engineering majors who had previously completed the course. One week before facilitating a maximum 15-minute discussion with Ciara, participants received information about Ciara, her team, and CATME scores and comments. NPMs facilitated their Zoom-video-recorded one-on-one discussions with Ciara (and two other team members not included in this study). We generated transcripts for each discussion for analysis.

We used qualitative content analysis to analyze each NPM’s questioning patterns and supportive statements. We drew from a codebook and applied codes from prior work with experienced NPMs. For the present study, we iteratively and collaboratively coded the novice transcripts, and used descriptive statistics to compare the groups.

We examined questions that NPMs used to: (1) elicit responses from Ciara about a new topic; and (2) probe on a response from Ciara to dig further into a topic. The experienced NPMs used a more probing questions than novice NPMs (this difference was statistically significant). The most frequent question type for both groups was general questions about the team (89% novice, 92% experienced). The next most frequent was about logistics (89% novice, 100% experienced). One third of NPMs (33%) in each group asked if Ciara was being marginalized. Fewer NPMs asked if Ciara was (dis)interested (11% novice, 25% experienced), perhaps because Ciara made it clear early in the discussion that she wanted to contribute to the team.

For both groups the most frequent type of supportive statement was when the NPM assured Ciara that they understood what Ciara shared (92% novice, 100% experienced). Stating agreement with Ciara was the next most frequent type of supportive statement (100% of novice, 83% experienced). No novice NPMs used support through empathy; 42% of experienced NPMs did. Finally, more experienced (83%) than novice (33%) NPMs shared how they as the NPM can help Ciara or the team.

This work has significance in that it provides insight into the kinds of questioning and support patterns that NPMs are inclined to use without having benefited from professional learning experiences to develop strategies to address team conflict. It also provides guidance on how both novice and experienced NPMs might benefit from such professional learning experiences.