Author(s):
Need: Teamwork is widely employed as a pedagogical tool in engineering education, and operating effectively in a team is also an important broad learning outcome in engineering. However, it cannot be assumed that students’ interactions within teams will always be constructive and positive experiences. Inequitable patterns of interaction can exclude individuals from participation and reproduce existing structures and systems of race- and gender-based marginalization that exist in wider society. Educational institutions should provide appropriate support to foster equitable and inclusive teamwork environments in order to maximize learning and affective outcomes for all students. Guiding questions: Here, the authors present a selection of research studies, supported by an IUSE award, that center on a team support software tool called Tandem. Tandem is designed to detect and respond to team behaviors and surface patterns of inequities, with interfaces for both students and faculty. The tool centers questions of equity and inclusion and provides formative feedback to students in the form of tailored messages and instructional content, including graphs of data situating team ratings. Tandem surveys ask students to reflect on the messages and patterns that they see in their team, as well as to describe behaviors they might try next using strategies from motivational interviewing. Outcomes: Collectively, the studies aim to evaluate the effectiveness of Tandem, both in terms of its ability to detect inequity and exclusion and in terms of its interventions. Specifically, we present how we have operationalized “diverse” and “effective” teams, as well as how statistical measures of these variables are related to student outcomes, student identities, and team behaviors. We will highlight patterns in student responses showing, for example, relationships between lesson interventions and student ratings and how patterns in team ratings change over time. We will also present the results of a scoping review synthesizing academic discourse around the notion of team equity. Forthcoming research projects will be described, including an initiative to explore instructors’ experiences with Tandem and how it assists their efforts to foster equitable teamwork.Broader impacts: The main broader impacts of this work lie in the improvements to Tandem effected through the project. Our research team is constantly interacting with the software developers, user experience designers, and behavioral scientists running the platform to make the results of research studies impact the platform in concrete ways: for example, we are creating a new lesson in Tandem based on a review we conducted about best practices for teams with neurodivergent members, and we are embedding the facets of team equity identified in the scoping review into the design of Tandem’s interventions. While Tandem was initially built for engineering design courses, it is currently used in team-based courses by about 3,500 unique students per year, a number that is growing steadily, especially as the tool is now being used at other universities.
Coauthors
Andrew D. Moffat, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; Rebecca L. Matz, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; Robin R. Fowler, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; Xiaping Li, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; Mark Mills, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; Spencer JaQuay, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA; Madison P. Jeffrey, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
