Asee peer logo

Approaches to Evidencing Intra-Team Equity in Student Collaborative Design Decision-Making Interactions

Download Paper |

Conference

2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Baltimore , Maryland

Publication Date

June 25, 2023

Start Date

June 25, 2023

End Date

June 28, 2023

Conference Session

Design Thinking and Student Design Teams

Tagged Division

Educational Research and Methods Division (ERM)

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

9

DOI

10.18260/1-2--42285

Permanent URL

https://strategy.asee.org/42285

Download Count

156

Request a correction

Paper Authors

biography

Andrew David Moffat University of Michigan

visit author page

Andrew Moffat is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan, working with the Engineering Education Research Unit and Center for Academic Innovation on an NSF-funded project to assess the effectiveness of Tandem, an in-house software platform designed to support and nurture teamwork skills in undergraduate engineering students. Andrew has a background in education research and evaluation, having previously worked on a project at the University of Leeds, UK, evaluating an institution-wide curriculum transformation initiative. He holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Nottingham, UK, prior to the undertaking of which he spent a decade teaching English as a foreign language.

visit author page

biography

Robin Fowler University of Michigan Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-6161-0986

visit author page

Robin Fowler is a Technical Communication lecturer and a Engineering Education researcher at the University of Michigan. Her teaching is primarily in team-based engineering courses, and her research focuses on equity in communication and collaboration as well as in group design decision making (judgment) under uncertainty. She is especially interested in how power relationships and rhetorical strategies affect group judgment in engineering design; one goal of this work is to to understand factors that inhibit full participation of students who identify with historically marginalized groups and investigate evidence-based strategies for mitigating these inequities. In addition, she is interested in technology and how specific affordances can change the ways we collaborate, learn, read, and write. Teaching engineering communication allows her to apply this work as she coaches students through collaboration, design thinking, and design communication. She is part of a team of faculty innovators who originated Tandem (tandem.ai.umich.edu), a tool designed to help facilitate equitable and inclusive teamwork environments.

visit author page

biography

Rebecca L. Matz University of Michigan Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-8220-7720

visit author page

Becky Matz is a Research Scientist on the Research and Analytics team at the Center for Academic Innovation at the University of Michigan. She directs and supports research projects across Academic Innovation’s portfolio of educational technologies and online learning experiences. Prior to joining Academic Innovation, she focused on STEM education assessment and research, connecting faculty with data, and developing interdisciplinary activities for introductory chemistry and biology courses at Michigan State University. Becky earned her Ph.D. in Chemistry and M.S. in Educational Studies from the University of Michigan.

visit author page

author page

Spencer JaQuay University of California, Irvine

Download Paper |

Abstract

Team- and project-based pedagogies are increasingly normative in engineering education and beyond. Student teamwork holds the promise of developing collaborative skills deemed essential for new engineers by professional accreditation bodies such as ABET. The emphasis on these models, furthermore, reflects developments in pedagogical theory, stressing the importance of experiential learning and the social construction of knowledge, repositioning the instructor as a facilitator and guide. Teamwork in an educational context differs from that in professional contexts in that learning outcomes for all team members – both in terms of technical knowledge and team-working skills – are a primary goal of the activity, even while more tangible task-related outcomes might be the main concern of the students themselves. However, team-based learning also holds the potential for team members to have negative experiences, of which instructors may have little or no awareness, especially in real-time. Teams may achieve team-level outcomes required for successful completion, in spite of uneven levels of participation and contribution. Reduced participation on the part of an individual team member may have many causes, pro-active or reactive: it may be a deliberate refusal to engage, a lack of self-confidence, or a response to hostility from other members, among other possibilities. Inequitable team interactions will lead to uneven uptake of desired learning outcomes. Fostering equity in interactions and identifying inequitable practices among team members is therefore an important part of implementing team-based pedagogies, and an essential first step in identifying and challenging systematic patterns of inequity with regard to members of historically marginalized groups. This paper will therefore explore ways in which equity in group decision-making may be conceptualized and observed, laying the foundations for identifying and addressing inequities in the student experience. It will begin by considering different potential manifestations of interactional equity, surveying notions derived from prior education research in the fields of health, mathematics, engineering, and the natural sciences. These notions include: equity of participation on the basis of quantified vocal contributions (in terms of words, utterances, or clausal units); distribution and evolution of interactional roles; equity of idea endorsement and uptake; distribution of inchargeness and influence; equity of access to positional identities and discourse practices; and team member citizenship. In the paper’s empirical component, we trial measures of equity taken or developed from this literature on a small dataset of transcripts showing verbal interactions between undergraduate student team members in a first-year engineering design course. Some measures will be qualitative and others quantitative, depending on the particular form and manifestation of equity they are designed to examine. Measures include manual coding of speech acts and interactional ‘bids’, statistical measures of utterance frequency and length, and computational approaches to modeling interactional features such as social impact and receptivity. Results are compared with the students’ own reflections on the interactions, taken immediately afterward. Recommendations are made for the application of the measures, both from research and practice perspectives. Keywords: Teamwork, Equity, Interaction, Design

Moffat, A. D., & Fowler, R., & Matz, R. L., & JaQuay, S. (2023, June), Approaches to Evidencing Intra-Team Equity in Student Collaborative Design Decision-Making Interactions Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--42285

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2023 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015