Track 2: Assessing Student Satisfaction and Engagement in Teams (ASSET): An Empirical Review and Scale Development

Prior research suggests that group differences, such as academic discipline influence the way that students perceive course interactions such as teamwork. These differences may lead to inequities in team experiences, student engagement, and learning for different groups of students. It is helpful to the field of engineering and to society as a whole to better understand these differences to provide better learning experiences for all students in engineering and other disciplines.

This project will identify how these differences may be observed, provide instructors guidance in interpreting those differences, and identify strategies to prevent, reduce, and remediate potential negative outcomes. By studying team composition, rating patterns, and team processes and outcomes across a range of academic disciplines, the team will identify patterns that are unique to, or more prevalent in, STEM disciplines or even specific engineering disciplines and their impact on student engagement.

Researchers will create a new survey instrument to measure engagement that will enable faculty to measure the effectiveness of course-level interventions to optimize their teaching resulting in more positive and equitable team and course experiences for all students. It will also allow instructors to identify and assist students who are less engaged or having poor team experiences.

The research team will explore how students’ team experiences may differ based on aspects including English language skills, class level (e.g. first-year students, seniors), and major (including sub-disciplines in engineering). The team will begin by examining how students from different groups experience team processes including task, relationship, and process conflict, psychological safety, trust, cohesion, satisfaction, team viability (willingness to work together in the future), and peer evaluations.

This will be accomplished using a large volume of data collected through CATME (a system developed with NSF support) over a 17-year period from over 1.8 million unique students of over 23,000 instructors at 2,566 institutions. The project team will leverage the system’s existing data and ability to collect new data from a large, multi-institutional, multidisciplinary user base.

This will enable us to examine potential differences in how different groups of students experience team work and team processes. A second contribution of this project is to develop and validate a direct measure of student engagement that assesses the three aspects of engagement that have been repeatedly found to matter: physical, cognitive, and affective.

Existing measures of student engagement that focus on external conditions or alternate conceptualizations of engagement are not well-suited to examine how students’ team experiences affect their physical, cognitive, and affective engagement with their education. A psychometrically sound measure of student engagement will be developed that will be useful in studying the impact of pedagogical innovations, including innovations addressing teamwork.

A final contribution of the proposed work will be to examine how student engagement is related to team processes, students’ willingness to work together in the future, and peer ratings of students’ teamwork contributions, as well as how the nature of those relationships may vary for different groups of students. The project team will collect new data to analyze these relationships, leveraging the efforts of CATME’s use in large-enrollment classes to administer the measures.

The results will provide norm-referenced data to serve as a knowledge base for instructors and researchers about group differences in team processes, peer ratings, and student engagement; and the correlates of student engagement for different groups.

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.