Engineering Identity, Slackers, and Goal Orientation in Team Engineering Projects

This research paper will describe the results from an investigation into long-running engineering team projects at a small liberal arts college. Engineering team projects, projects in which groups of students perform an engineering task over three or more weeks, comprise a significant portion of the engineering curriculum at the college, and students at the college have reported that engineering team projects have significant impact on the formation of engineering identity and the experience of women and underrepresented minorities in engineering. Though team formation is well studied in the classroom, less work has focused on the experience of student teams that must work together for a long period of time. The purpose of this study is to understand the factors that influence the experiences and outcomes of engineering teams by asking three questions: how do team member goal orientations affect the outcomes of engineering team projects? What team forming mechanisms (e.g: self-selected, random, or instructor selected) lead to better team experiences? And, what effect does team project work have on engineering identity? The hypothesis of this paper is that positive team experiences, facilitated by similar goal orientations among team members, contribute to engineering identity and increased performance in team projects. Surveys and interviews were administered to students in two courses to examine this hypothesis. The courses were a freshman level introduction to engineering design class and a junior-level, industry-sponsored capstone project class. Students were selected for interviews based on initial survey data, and strategic sampling was used to gather a set of students with different perspectives for interviews. The students in the introductory course will be asked to take two interviews - one at the beginning of their team projects and one at the end of the semester. Students in the junior-level course were interviewed once. The interviews and surveys were designed to investigate student goal orientations, engineering identity, team formation strategies, and team experiences. The links between these factors and team performance will be assessed by analyzing final project and course grades, and by observing changes between the early and late interviews of the students in the introductory class. Six interviews have been carried out at the time of this abstract, and more are planned. Results from the study will be available for ASEE 2021.