Active Learning Group Work: Helpful or Harmful for Women in Engineering?

Abstract

is an undergraduate student studying environmental engineering and environmental policy at the University of Colorado Boulder. Megan has been involved in education outreach and mentorship for much of her college career. She completed a STEM education class in which she shadowed a local 5th grade teacher and taught three of her own STEM lessons. Megan has also been a new-student mentor through her department's peer mentoring program. Now, Megan is interested in researching how team dynamics affect undergraduate women's confidence levels in engineering.

Is Carla grumpy? Analysis of peer evaluations to explore microaggressions and other marginalizing behaviors in engineering student teams

“…For example, in Tonso's ethnographic explorations of engineering student teams (Tonso, 1996a, 1996b, 2006a, 2006b), she noted the engineering classroom embodied prototypical masculine norms including classroom discourse and interpersonal interactions resulting in silencing, isolation, and systemic mistreatment of women in engineering team settings. Other scholars exploring the presence of gender‐based marginalization within engineering student teams have reported that women tend to be assigned to gendered and non‐technical roles, experience lower active participation, have their ideas ignored, have lower visible involvement in the team, experience devaluation of prior credentials, and have their expertise discounted by men on the team (Beddoes & Panther, 2018; Joshi, 2014; Keogh et al, 2018; Meadows & Sekaquaptewa, 2011, 2013; Tonso, 1996a, 1996b, 2006b; Trytten et al, 2015; Williams et al, 2018; Wolfe et al, 2016), all problematic experiences that negatively affect learning and sense of belonging. We note here that the literature on gender‐based marginalization is incomplete, as there is little research outside the reductive gender binary, thus missing the experiences of transgender and gender‐nonconforming students on engineering teams.…”

Learning Equity in First-Year Engineering Design

“…However, such tools may inadvertently cue students to distribute work according to stereotypical social roles in the belief that by having team members "play to their strengths," they are doing what is best for the team [15]. Such task distribution invariably limits new learning across team members, and may exclude historically underrepresented students from high profile team tasks (such as design and fabrication) [16], thus promoting the entrenchment of implicit biases.…”

Work in Progress: Structured Teamwork for Learning Equity in First-year Engineering Design

“…Such tools may inadvertently cue students to distribute work according to stereotypical social roles in the belief that by having team members "play to their strengths," they are doing what is best for the team [15]. Such task distribution may limit new learning across team members, exclude historically underrepresented students from high profile team tasks (such as design and fabrication) [16], and thus promote the entrenchment of implicit biases. This study leverages a cooperative learning approach [23] to teamwork and learning in a first-year engineering design course at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering in order to provide more equitable access to learning for all students.…”