Developing and Analyzing an Online Cultural Mindset Module for Improving Multicultural Engineering Team Effectiveness

This project aims to serve the national interest by improving how engineering students work in multicultural teams. Success as an engineer today requires multicultural collaboration. To help engineering students sharpen their cultural skills, many engineering courses place students into multicultural teams.

However, evidence suggests that students in these teams often struggle with psychological barriers, such as mistrust, that prevent effective collaboration. To mitigate these barriers, students of diverse cultural backgrounds need to develop the skills and aptitudes that support working together effectively. This project aims to build a scalable and sustainable tool to help engineering students develop multicultural teamwork skills.

It will apply research about mindset to develop an online learning module that will be integrated into introductory engineering courses. Findings from the project will be incorporated into CATME (Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness), a widely used, freely available tool for forming and managing undergraduate teams in STEM and other courses.

Implementing the online learning module is expected to improve collaboration in diverse STEM environments and equip engineering majors for the workforce.

To improve engineering students’ multicultural teamwork skills, the project aims to develop a cultural mindset module in three stages. In stage 1, the project team will complete a comprehensive literature review, focus-group interviews, and a survey of engineers in multicultural teams and use these data to develop a prototype cultural mindset module.

The second stage will determine mechanisms of cultural mindset effects in teams, generating knowledge to refine the module through a teamwork survey of current undergraduate engineering students and iterative pilot testing. The third stage will determine the module’s effectiveness with a randomized controlled trial in a first-year engineering program and follow-up surveys.

It is expected that students who participate will demonstrate more positive attitudes and constructive behaviors in multicultural teamwork, resulting in improved climate and performance of their teams. Project findings will be disseminated in engineering education and psychology conferences and journals, and the module will be released on repositories of engineering education and cultural learning resources.

The results generated by this project may catalyze future research on educational interventions that support a diverse society, as well as advance efforts to create more positive cross-cultural relations and inclusive climates in engineering programs. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students.

Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.