Student-centered and project-based collaborative learning strategy is highly emphasized in education, especially in STEM fields. Despite its many advantages in supporting learning and professional growth, negative factors that influence collaboration cannot be ignored. By far one of the most frequently mentioned factors is unequal contribution from teammates, which leads to frustrations in the process and tensions in relationships. Much work has been done in investigating effective team collaboration, but few empirically looked at the team equal contribution from a diversity perspective of teams at more granular levels, particularly in the context of engineering design. This study will explore the relationships between team diversity (in terms of differences in gender, self-perceptions about ones’ ability and interests, and peer-perceived communication skills) and their members’ equal contribution. The data was collected from 26 teams in a second-year engineering design course in two semesters. We concluded that the diversity of teams is important to equal contribution, but needs to be considered carefully. More specifically, the teams in this study exhibited more equal contributions when members with a team were more diverse in terms of gender but less diverse in terms of peer-perceived communication skills, design confidence, and teamwork interest. The diversity in engineering design confidence and design interests did not show a clear pattern.
Presenter(s): Maddie Weaver, Mechanical Engineering Major
Advisor(s): Jinjuan She, Department of Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering
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