2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This is a theory/methods full paper.

Team-based pedagogies are an important aspect of undergraduate engineering learning experiences, which are thought to facilitate important skills necessary for professional practices. These include teamwork, technical communication, design thinking, prototyping, and fabrication. However, the degree to which students realize these outcomes depends on the extent to which they gain meaningful access to the learning activities that are designed into such teamwork pedagogies. Meanwhile, existing research has frequently documented the ways that team-based pedagogies are experienced inequitably, particularly for students from historically excluded backgrounds. Thus, team-based pedagogies present a significant pedagogical challenge: instructors often find it difficult, if not impossible, to monitor student teams to ensure that students experience equitable participation and equitable learning outcomes.

Existing scholarship has documented several approaches to addressing such challenges. Researchers point to aspects of team-based pedagogies, such as team formation processes and teammate evaluation strategies, for supporting equitable participation and learning outcomes. Researchers, for example, suggest avoiding “stranding” students from historically excluded backgrounds during team formation processes. Meanwhile, peer evaluations such as “rate-the-teammate” surveys are widely used in team-based learning environments. However, these strategies are often only as effective as they are (a) timely and (b) assessing the specific processes and practices that result in inequities. For example, end-of-term evaluations may miss opportunities to support students during learning activities. Similarly, approaches that capture only overall contributions to a project may overlook task-based inequities, such as the well-documented pattern of students dividing and conquering work such that individual students take tasks with which they are already familiar, leaving students with less experience with fewer opportunities to develop engineering skills.

The purpose of this research study was to develop an online dashboard that highlights teamwork inequities in team-based learning environments. The current dashboard utilizes survey data collected from students enrolled in entry-level engineering courses at a public research university from Winter 2023 to Winter 2024. Across the included courses, students typically worked in teams of four to five on semester-long projects. We manually categorized tasks into 7 categories: computing, fabricating, managing, researching, collaborating, documenting/preparing deliverables, and presenting tasks. We then model individuals and teams as agentic actors in social networks, drawing on social network theory and methods to depict important teamwork processes such as task allocation and participation in team activities. For example, in a teamwork network, a tie represents one student recognizing another’s participation in a task. Density is the proportion of these ties compared to all possible ties. Teams with higher density are often described as more cohesive and as sharing participation more equitably. Drawing on participatory design strategies, we interviewed engineering faculty (N = 9) to gather feedback on both the appropriate content of the dashboard, as well as to ascertain recommendations about data visualizations and contextual information that best support faculty pedagogies. This paper describes the use of social network theory in the creation of the visual dashboard and its iteration in response to instructor feedback.