2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Teamwork is a critical professional skill that has received increasing attention in engineering education, especially in first year engineering curricula. Peer evaluation has become essential tool for assessing teamwork skills within engineering education community. However, growing evidence shows that students’ evaluations of their peers may be influenced by gender and team’s gender compositions, this raises questions about fairness and bias in using peer evaluation for assessment purposes.
This study investigates the impact of gender bias in peer evaluation and perceived teamwork behaviors in first-year engineering teams. Both quantitative data and qualitative data are collected. Quantitative data consists of Likert-scale peer evaluation scores, and qualitative data includes open-ended peer comments.
Preliminary quantitative data from multiple semesters indicated patterns of gender biases for all students across cohort regardless of the team composition. To help explore possible factors that contributing to the bias, we divided teams into three categories: (1) teams with less than 50% female members, (2) teams with exactly 50% female members, and (3) teams with more than 50% female members. Quantitative data analysis across will be used to compare differences among teams with different gender compositions, qualitative data will be used to identify underline themes and behavioral discrepancies. Findings from this study will provide insights into how gender composition affects peer evaluation outcomes and inform strategies for equitable team formation and bias reduction in team peer evaluation.