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

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Conference

2015 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Seattle, Washington

Publication Date

June 14, 2015

Start Date

June 14, 2015

End Date

June 17, 2015

ISBN

978-0-692-50180-1

ISSN

2153-5965

Conference Session

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

Tagged Divisions

Electrical and Computer, Minorities in Engineering, First-Year Programs, Liberal Education/Engineering & Society, Women in Engineering, Design in Engineering Education, Engineering Libraries, Technological and Engineering Literacy/Philosophy of Engineering, and Student

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

23

Page Numbers

26.1007.1 - 26.1007.23

DOI

10.18260/p.24344

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/24344

Download Count

3382

Paper Authors

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Lorelle A Meadows Michigan Technological University

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Dr. Lorelle A. Meadows is the Dean of the Pavlis Honors College at Michigan Technological University.

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Denise Sekaquaptewa University of Michigan

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Denise Sekaquaptewa, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research in experimental social psychology focuses on stereotyping and intergroup dynamics, in particular how being in the numerical minority in terms of gender or race influences academic outcomes and experiences.

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Marie C Paretti Virginia Tech Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-2202-6928

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Marie C. Paretti is an Associate Professor of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech, where she co-directs the Virginia Tech Engineering Communications Center (VTECC). Her research focuses on communication in engineering design, interdisciplinary communication and collaboration, design education, and gender in engineering. She was awarded a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation to study expert teaching in capstone design courses, and is co-PI on numerous NSF grants exploring communication, design, and identity in engineering. Drawing on theories of situated learning and identity development, her work includes studies on the teaching and learning of communication, effective teaching practices in design education, the effects of differing design pedagogies on retention and motivation, the dynamics of cross-disciplinary collaboration in both academic and industry design environments, and gender and identity in engineering.

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Alice L. Pawley Purdue University, West Lafayette Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-9117-4855

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Alice Pawley is an Associate Professor in the School of Engineering Education and an affiliate faculty member in the Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies Program and the Division of Environmental and Ecological Engineering at Purdue University. She was co-PI of Purdue’s ADVANCE program from 2008-2014, focusing on the underrepresentation of women in STEM faculty positions. She runs the Feminist Research in Engineering Education (FREE, formerly RIFE, group), whose diverse projects and group members are described at feministengineering.org. She received a CAREER award in 2010 and a PECASE award in 2012 for her project researching the stories of undergraduate engineering women and men of color and white women. She received ASEE-ERM’s best paper award for her CAREER research, and the Denice Denton Emerging Leader award from the Anita Borg Institute, both in 2013. She helped found, fund, and grow the PEER Collaborative, a peer mentoring group of early career and recently tenured faculty and research staff primarily evaluated based on their engineering education research productivity. She can be contacted by email at apawley@purdue.edu.

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Shawn S. Jordan Arizona State University, Polytechnic campus Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-1639-779X

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SHAWN JORDAN, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. He teaches context-centered electrical engineering and embedded systems design courses, and studies the use of context in both K-12 and undergraduate engineering design education. He received his Ph.D. in Engineering Education (2010) and M.S./B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University. Dr. Jordan is PI on several NSF-funded projects related to design, including an NSF Early CAREER Award entitled “CAREER: Engineering Design Across Navajo Culture, Community, and Society” and “Might Young Makers be the Engineers of the Future?” He has also been part of the teaching team for NSF’s Innovation Corps for Learning, and was named one of ASEE PRISM’s “20 Faculty Under 40” in 2014.

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Debbie Chachra Olin College of Engineering

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Adrienne Minerick Michigan Technological University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-2382-7831

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Adrienne Minerick received her M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame and B.S. from Michigan Technological University. Adrienne’s research interests include electrokinetics, predominantly dielectrophoretic characterizations of cells, and the development of biomedical microdevices. She earned a NSF CAREER award and was nominated for Michigan Professor of the Year in 2014. Research within her Medical micro-Device Engineering Research Laboratory (M.D. – ERL) also inspires the development of Desktop Experiment Modules (DEMos) for use in chemical engineering classrooms or as outreach activities in area schools (see www.mderl.org). Adrienne is currently co-Chair of ASEE's Diversity Committee and PIC I Chair; she has previously served on WIED, ChED, and NEE leadership teams and contributed to 37 ASEE conference proceedings articles.

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Abstract

Interactive Panel: Improving the Experiences of Marginalized Students on Engineering Design TeamsIt is widely recognized that collaborative learning (i.e., group work) benefits student learning bycreating an educational environment in which students achieve higher grades, learn at a deeperlevel and retain information longer. However, group work is fraught with challenges for studentswho are inexperienced in managing interpersonal interactions and for faculty who sometimesstruggle to guide student teams in achieving successful interactions and learning outcomes. Oneimportant challenge centers on the interactions between students from groups negativelystereotyped as poor performers in engineering (e.g., women and underrepresented racial/ethnicminorities) and others. A body of research in psychology indicates that students from thesemarginalized groups may have qualitatively different group work experiences compared toothers, which may contribute to their under-representation in engineering.Recent research suggests that the negative experiences of people from marginalized groups onengineering student design teams can influence many factors that contribute to persistence andsuccess, such as development of self-efficacy, sense of belonging, identification and identityintegration. Often, negative experiences are the result of subtle bias or schemas that studentsbring with them into their teams, and occur despite the employment of best practices in teamformation.However, faculty management and institutional factors can play a key role in how under-represented students experience their teamwork environment. This panel brings togetherresearchers in the fields of stereotype threat, engineering design, teamwork, motivation, race,gender and intersectionality to unveil a variety of mechanisms that contribute to the studentexperience on design teams and to explore opportunities for faculty and administrators toimprove the educational experience for all students.A paper will be developed to provide an orientation to recently published literature in theseareas. It will also include discussions from the perspectives of each panelist on the teamworkenvironment in engineering education. Lastly, the paper will highlight a selection of promisingstrategies for faculty, advocates and administrators.Panel attendees will benefit from a brief orientation to research on the experiences of peoplefrom under-represented groups in engineering, an opportunity to question assumptions associatedwith the teamwork environment, and an exploration of strategies for improvement and change.

Meadows, L. A., & Sekaquaptewa, D., & Paretti, M. C., & Pawley, A. L., & Jordan, S. S., & Chachra, D., & Minerick, A. (2015, June), Interactive Panel: Improving the Experiences of Marginalized Students on Engineering Design Teams Paper presented at 2015 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Seattle, Washington. 10.18260/p.24344

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