2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This Work in Progress paper seeks to investigate a bidirectional relationship between engineering identity and teamwork in a first-year general engineering design course.

Teamwork is essential to engineering education and has been shown to improve learning outcomes, promote the development of interpersonal and conflict resolution skills, and create community. The implementation of group work early in engineering education prepares students to succeed in future collaboration, with demonstrated improvement in capstone design courses given prior team experience. However, many factors are detrimental to the teaming experience and subsequent learning outcomes, including a mismatch in goals or expectations, inequitable task allocation, or exclusionary social practices and reduced psychological safety – all of which are influenced by gender, race, and other social divisions and may result in increased attrition in engineering disciplines (particularly for underrepresented minority students).

For first-year students, negative team interactions have the potential to undermine the development of self-efficacy, engineering identity, and a sense of belonging within their undergraduate engineering program; these factors are early predictors of retention and long-term academic success. Engineering identity development relies significantly on recognition, including the acknowledgement and validation of peers. Negative experiences among team members may deny students this recognition and damage their belief in their own competence. Members of historically underrepresented groups, who report lower levels of self-efficacy and belonging within undergraduate engineering programs, face stereotyping and bias in team interactions, inhibiting their ability to see themselves as engineers.

It is imperative that engineering educators understand the role that teamwork can play as a positive force in the engineering curriculum for improved learning outcomes and interpersonal competencies, as well as construction of personal engineering identities and communities among students. This study builds on previous investigations analyzing the impact of gender on social and task cohesion, self-efficacy, and role determination in senior engineering capstone teams, and applies these core concepts to the first-year engineering environment. Furthermore, this project incorporates prior work comparing students’ perceptions of ABET design criteria across first-year and senior engineering design courses, to identify differences in teamwork experiences at the start and end of the undergraduate engineering curriculum. Two primary research questions were examined: 1) How do differences in self-efficacy based on gender influence role determination and team leadership in first-year engineering design teams? And 2) How do teaming experiences in the first year of college influence students’ perceptions of their engineering identity?

This study took place at an R1 University and involved a 15-minute IRB-approved voluntary survey that included information about student demographics, teaming experiences, and perceptions of engineering identity. Teaming experience questions were evaluated using the Team Learning Beliefs and Behaviors (TLBB) Model and utilized scales taken from validated questionnaires. The TLBB framework characterizes beliefs in interpersonal contexts (psychological safety, interdependence, group potency, and cohesion) as prerequisites for team learning behaviors, allowing researchers to situate individual student identity within the cultural context of the team. Additionally, survey questions measuring engineering identity were adapted from validated studies measuring three distinct constructions of engineering identity: recognition, interest, and performance/competence.

Ultimately, the results of this paper will provide insight into the social factors impacting team performance and engineering identity to improve learning outcomes in first-year undergraduate engineering programs in the future. This project may inform the use of team development tools for first-year engineering programs and identify indicators of negative team interactions which may impact the construction of engineering identity, so that engineering educators are empowered to better support student teams.