2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) are essential pillars of modern engineering education, especially in the STEM field where the number of minority and underrepresented students who earned a bachelor’s degree has increased by more than 28% in the past decade. To sustain this growth, educational environments must become more inclusive and supportive for all students. Throughout the course of their undergraduate studies, engineering students usually end up being part of a diverse team, and learning how to be an effective member in such teams is an important skill that we, educators, need to teach them. Numerous research studies can be found in the literature on the effectiveness of diversity on teams’ performance and creativity in many fields, however, some of these studies raised concerns about the psychological safety and conflict levels being at risk in more diverse teams. In addition, when it comes to the engineering field, the literature is scarce in the number of studies that investigate the effect of DEI on team members psychological safety and conflict, which is a gap that needs to be filled.
In this work-in-progress, the authors will study the effect of team members diversification on the teams’ performance and inter-person interactions. The two courses investigated will be an engineering analysis and embedded devices introductory courses offered to freshmen students in the First Year Program and to sophomore students in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department, respectively, at the school hosting this study. The study involved 580+ students who were divided into teams of three at the beginning of the semester and work on a semester long project, with the same team, until the end of the semester. The authors used CATME to divide the students into teams, taking into consideration different diversity aspects, such as gender, race, ethnicity, and background. The authors plan mainly to answer the following research question: does the diversity composition of the team affect the overall team harmony and how team members interact together.
This work is a continuation on a preliminary study that was published in ASEE 2024 on the effect of student diversity on engineering teams’ performance. While that study suggests that diverse teams tend to perform better on graded assignments, this work will extend the investigation to include the harmony and inter-person interactions of team members within diverse versus non-diverse teams.
Evaluation and assessment of this work will be done quantitively, using CATME Peer Evaluation, to capture the students’ opinions about their experience in being part of diverse/non-diverse teams. The authors will investigate survey results related to team dynamics, including (but not limited to): 1) interpersonal cohesiveness, 2) psychological safety, 3) team satisfaction, and 4) team conflict.