2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering and technical activities are a crucial aspect in education curriculum and standards. Substantial efforts have been made to increase the number of women in STEM careers and majors, however, they still remain underrepresented. Even at the middle school level, literature shows that girls are not actively being exposed to and participating in engineering contexts compared to their male counterparts. Researchers have suggested collaborative learning might lead to increased interest and participation in STEM. Yet, literature points to the need for understanding how minoritized students interact with and experience collaborative group work settings. This study aims to explore how middle school girls in STEM engage with their peers during microelectronics group activities and how these interactions influence their learning experiences and collaborative skills through the research question: How do girls in a STEM course approach a novel microelectronics group activity and what does their discourse look like to successfully complete the task at hand?

Researchers collected approximately eight hours of data over 5-unit lessons in a middle school engineering and technology classroom. The students participated in creating an electronic expansion pack for the Sphero BOLT using a micro:bit and sensors. This analysis focused on video recordings of two pairs of girls in this classroom. We employed a qualitative discourse analysis approach to analyze videos, using the Team Interaction Observation Protocol outlined in Purzer (2011). This conceptual framework specifies six types of discourse actions: task-oriented, response-oriented, learning-oriented, support-oriented, challenge-oriented, and disruptive, and was used to categorize students’ interactions.

Preliminary results suggest that girls who engage in collaborative group work during the microelectronics lessons engaged in all six types of discourse actions and displayed more discourse of support and task-oriented learning. Future work will compare groups of girls with groups of boys and girls.