Collaborative Research: Research Initiation: Strategies to Coach Near-Peer Mentors to Support First-Year Engineering Students Experiencing Team Conflicts

Team-based projects are widely used in undergraduate engineering courses—from first-year introductory engineering courses to senior-level capstone projects. Assigning students into teams to collaborate on a design problem helps them to develop technical skills as well as essential professional skills. In this process, engineering students often struggle with conflicts in their teams.

Typically, introductory engineering courses have large enrollments making it hard for a single faculty instructor to effectively monitor all the teams and intervene on team conflicts quickly. To mitigate this problem, many large-enrollment engineering courses employ undergraduate students who have previously taken the course to mentor student teams.

It is important to coach undergraduate student mentors to identify and respond to team conflicts. This work will first document the common reasons behind student team conflicts in a large introductory engineering course with approximately 650 students. It will then use a simulated classroom environment to understand how undergraduate student mentors respond to various team conflict scenarios.

Through this, we will identify the essential features of a coaching program that enables undergraduate students to become effective mentors of student teams and help them better navigate such conflicts. By developing strategies to promote persistence and professional skills for teamwork in the first year, we will empower all engineering students, including student mentors, to successfully navigate future team experiences in both future courses and professional life.

Many students in engineering programs are assigned their first team-based design project in first-semester introductory engineering courses. Interpersonal conflict with teammates is a common challenge for students. Responding to team conflict in a timely manner is a logistical challenge in introductory engineering courses that typically have large enrollments.

We are focused on developing scalable strategies for enabling first-year engineering students to navigate team conflicts successfully with the help of near-peer mentors (NPMs)—undergraduate students who have previously completed the course. This project seeks to develop a coaching program for NPMs to promote equity-oriented strategies for identifying and responding to conflicts that arise during team-based design projects.

This project will focus on three key research questions: (1) What are the root causes and common characteristics of engagement-related team conflicts in introductory engineering courses? (2) Given a mixed-reality simulation of engagement-related team conflict, how do NPMs facilitate discussions that aim to diagnose and intervene in instances of team conflicts? (3) What features of a coaching program are essential to improve the efficacy of NPMs in responding to reports of disengaged team members with strategies that promote persistence and develop professional habits for all team members? This study will produce knowledge about the underlying causes of these team conflicts and how NPMs use pedagogical strategies to identify and remedy them.

The research will be conducted using a mixed methods approach to collecting, analyzing, and integrating both qualitative and quantitative data sources. We will use a novel mixed-reality simulation environment to collect data from NPMs. The simulation scenarios will be informed by interdisciplinary research in education; diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ); and organizational behavior.

It will be a first step toward a capacity-building strategy for addressing the problem in large-enrollment introductory engineering courses. Overall, this study promotes the professional formation of engineers through the development of professional skills necessary for equitable and effective collaboration on teams early in the undergraduate engineering curriculum.

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.