2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Undergraduate enrollment in XX Aerospace Department has more than doubled from 550 students in 2015 to 1,285 students in 2025. This has placed a strain on the department’s capstone course: a two-semester, hands-on sequence where students work in teams to design, prototype, and test aerospace systems. In AY 2024_25, 290 students enrolled across 24 teams, and produced 24 prototypes. However, the department/s fabrication spaces struggled to accommodate this load.

To address these challenges, a new course structure was implemented in AY 2025_26. Students are now organized into six sections of up to 45 students. Each section is advised by a faculty member who develops an aerospace design project in their technical area. Within each section, students work in large teams (23~45 students) divided into functional sub-teams. For example, the aircraft design section is divided into airframe, aerodynamics, propulsion, flight mechanics, and internal structure sub-teams. Students must work within and across sub-teams to design their subsystem and ensure full system integration. Teams are led by leadership sub-teams (2-4 students) in roles such as program manager and systems engineer. Under this model, the sections will produce one to two prototypes (10 total). One section will operate under the AY 2024_25 structure (4 teams of 9 students each, producing 4 prototypes), serving as a small control group.

In this new structure, faculty were concerned that some students would not contribute to these large teams, relying on others to carry the workload. Faculty also questioned student leaders’ ability to effectively guide their peers, and whether students would have a positive learning experience in larger teams. This led to the following research questions:

RQ1: What percentage of students actively engage in these large teams?
Engagement is defined as a student’s constructive involvement in team-based work, reflected in both their technical and interpersonal contributions to the team.

RQ2: Do peers rate their leadership team as effective on these large teams?
Effective leadership is defined as peers’ perceptions that their leadership team seeks input from many members of the team and effectively delegates decisions.

RQ3: Do these large teams have an inclusive learning environment that allows students to share ideas and take risks?
An inclusive learning environment is defined as a collaborative team climate in which students feel valued and able to contribute their ideas without fear of negative consequences.

To evaluate these research questions, a 28-item survey began in AY2024-25, and studies leadership in engineering teams. This IRB-approved voluntary survey covers team structure, leadership effectiveness, learning environment, peer performance, engineering identity, and demographics. Students are surveyed three times in the fall and twice in the spring semester to capture the team environment throughout the project lifecycle. Faculty surveys will also be used to contextualize and corroborate the self-reported student data. Data will be analyzed using multilevel modeling to account for the nested structure of students within teams. Findings from AY 2025-26 will be compared with AY 2024-25 to understand whether student engagement, leadership effectiveness, and learning environments differ in large teams (25+ students) vs smaller teams (9-14 students) and to inform future capstone course design.