2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This empirical, work-in-progress study aims to observe how different collaborative practices can support productive engagement with moments of ambiguity, uncertainty, and confusion (AU&C). AU&C are pervasive in engineering practice: client objectives can be ambiguous, resource constraints may contribute unanticipated barriers, problems don’t always have known answers, and deliverables often have multiple feasible solutions. Collaboration serves as a key resource for professional engineers to grapple with this AU&C. Consequently, literature suggests that incorporating collaborative classroom assignments that are project-based, open-ended, and industrially relevant can provide students with work that better prepares them for engineering practice. However, despite the established literature that integrating this type of work into the classroom environment is beneficial for learning, there is a gap in the literature on what effective collaboration looks like when working through tasks that elicit AU&C. We seek to observe what these effective collaboration patterns look like through a case study of two students (Maeve and Leo) in a first-year a first-year undergraduate introductory computing classroom. We operationalize effective collaboration as collaboration that aligns with Engle and Conant’s framework of Productive Disciplinary Engagement: in other words, participation that yields significant growth in disciplinary topics from start to finish. We analyze these collaborative moments through the lens of Medina and Stahl’s Group Practice Theory. Rather than looking at individual actions alone, we observe the interactions between the pair and the effect of their interactions on the team as a unit. To code our video and audio data, we turned to Braun and Clarke’s Thematic Analysis. We developed preliminary codes, categorized them, and developed themes. This paper discusses two of our preliminary themes and one key insight. We notice that while Maeve and Leo don’t align with traditionally adopted collaboration practices, the pair still productively engages with AU&C to come to an effective solution. In analyzing their interactions, we characterize their collaboration as involving joint sensemaking - both verbal and nonverbal - and as being socioemotionally attuned to one another. Looking at these behaviors, we propose that these themes that surround the norms of the team as a whole may be better indicators of successful collaboration than guidelines for how an individual student should act in a team setting. The results of this case study highlight the value of diverse experiences in team work, accommodate more accessible and robust ways of collaboration, and hold potential to influence instructor guidance on collaboration to better reflect the skills needed in industry.