2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Collaboration is at the core of engineering practice. On a daily basis, engineers are expected to work in teams to solve complex problems and achieve shared goals. While engineering education typically emphasizes the acquisition of technical knowledge and skills, it is essential to recognize that technical proficiency must be paired with effective collaboration. However, engineering students typically receive more training in technical competencies than in collaborative skills, even though engineering practitioners are expected to excel as team players. Studies indicate that simply assigning students to teams does not ensure they will develop the capacity to identify and engage in behaviors that promote effective collaboration. Much of the existing research has focused on identifying behaviors and teammate traits that correlate with collaborative effectiveness. However, to the best of our knowledge, little research has explored the frequency with which these behaviors are performed and why certain behaviors are less commonly practiced than others.

This project, funded by the NSF, started in 2022. We focus on studying collaborative behaviors in engineering student teams and engineering practitioner teams, utilizing the Reasoned Action Approach Theory. We deployed a survey consisting of the CATME list of 16 collaborative behaviors. Our goal is to uncover the dynamics of collaboration in engineering by determining which behaviors associated with effective collaboration are reported as being performed least in student and practitioner engineering design teams. Additionally, we aim to analyze whether these patterns differ across different educational and professional settings. We also seek to uncover the reasons why engineering students and practitioners choose not to perform the target behaviors.

We envision that our contribution will enhance training in collaborative skills and thus increase teams' productivity. In this poster, we introduce our project, highlight our project objectives, and explain our latest findings. We also show our progress trajectory and next steps. Our team was able to gauge students' perspectives in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary capstone teams at two large research-intensive universities, and around 100 responses were collected. Our data analysis yielded the following four behaviors as least performed in multidisciplinary capstone student teams: noticing changes that influence the team's progress, knowing what everyone on the team should be doing and noticing problems, alerting teammates or suggesting solutions when the team's success is threatened, and being able to perform some of the tasks normally done by other team members. Our plan is to distribute the survey among students in traditional capstone courses. We are currently recruiting engineering practitioners for our survey as our scope of research extends to professional engineering teams.