Work in progress — Taking one for the team: Goal orientation and gender-correlated task division

Abstract

Assessments of student behavior in firstsemester design experiences suggest that early teambased design projects can promote a team performance goal orientation that undermines students' learning goals. In particular, we find that gender-correlated division of work can easily and unconsciously occur in these teams and that performance-oriented teams may be more likely to undermine womens' learning goals then mens' learning goals. We propose mechanisms to explain the effect and present results of promising interventions.

Interactive Panel: Improving the Experiences of Marginalized Students on Engineering Design Teams

“…41 There is some evidence that individual differences in factors that predict engineering success lead students from different groups to engage in different tasks. 42 In support of this, Meadows and Sekaquaptewa 43,44 showed that women on first year engineering project teams exhibit less active participation than men regardless of the representation of women on the team. In this work, student behaviors in 246 videotaped engineering group project presentations were analyzed.…”

“…90 Strategies to support this learning focus can include asking students to articulate their learning goals for the course, and then asking teams to create a project plan to address those goals, a strategy which has been shown to close gaps in the types of tasks that students engage in by gender. 42 Also, the jigsaw classroom approach, in which each student must cooperate with peers to achieve individual goals, can be used as a technique to build empathy and compassion among students and to create a respectful learning environment. 126 As part of understanding the learning processes that go on within teams, it's worth thinking about some implicit assumptions that students have about teamwork and leadership.…”

Investigating Task Choice in First-Year Engineering Team Projects

“…17 Studies have found that women on first-year engineering teams may take on clerical or organizational roles, without recognizing that they are being subject to gendered role assignment by the team. 18 Another study found that men report doing more CAD and prototyping and women spent more time preparing presentations and learning about people's needs.…”

“…It could also help set up other interventions that encourage men and women to do similar types of tasks and could discourage gender divides in the roles men and women are playing from occurring. 17 The mastery experiences that students complete in projects significantly affect their engineering confidence and self-efficacy. However, it is not enough to put thought into designing project statements and timelines and expecting student success.…”

Relating Project Tasks in Design Courses to the Development of Engineering Self-efficacy

“…[21][22][23][24][25] Students with lower incoming engineering self-efficacy may be less apt to take on more technical tasks (or be less likely to be tasked with them by the group), and may default to tasks that don't require them to develop new technical engineering skills, such as scheduling team meetings or designing slides for the team's oral presentation. 26 As a result of spending less time on engineering work, these students may fall into a "pernicious cycle:" low initial engineering self-efficacy means that they do not engage in the types of tasks that would increase it, and failing to engage in these tasks means their engineering self-efficacy doesn't increase, potentially setting them up to repeat the pattern in subsequent courses. We are also investigating the students' outgoing confidence and self-efficacy levels with regards to the tasks that they complete as a part of the project, to determine if certain classes of tasks lead to higher increases in confidence or engineering self-efficacy.…”