The Cognitive And Motivational Scaffolding That First Year Engineering Students Need When Solving Design Problems In Collaborative Teams

This study aims to contribute to the literature on engineering learning by examining the role of team discourse in supporting or hindering first-year engineering students’ self-efficacy and achievement. Bandura’s self-efficacy theory and Vygotsky’s social constructivist theory were used as theoretical frameworks. Twenty-five first-year engineering students (six teams) participated in the study and their team discussions were video and audio recorded between February and May 2007. During the study, students worked on three design projects: a fire rescue project, a pharmaceutical lozenge design project, and a street-crossing problem. A threestage sequential mixed-methods approach (qualitative à quantitative àqualitative) was used for data analysis. The first and second stages involved the coding of student talk and correlation analyses between self-efficacy, achievement, and discourse type. Results from these two phases were presented in detail in a previous paper. In summary, the analyses showed a statistically significant positive correlation between the amount of supportive comments given and the selfefficacy of the giver. There was a negative correlation between self-efficacy and engagement in disruptive behaviors. In addition, initial self-efficacy was found to be a predictor of responsive behavior. The third step of the data analysis, the focus of this paper, involved an in-depth examination of three case study students (Bryan, a support-oriented student; Eric, a responseoriented student; and Alex, a disruptive student) and their teams. Results suggest that supportive comments can improve self-efficacy and motivation and are critical for collaborative decisionmaking; however, a lack of analytical argumentation and skepticism can hinder cognitive processes and hurt student learning. As an implication of this study, a list of recommendations is made and an instrument is developed to help scaffold student team processes. Introduction & Literature Review Today, more than half of the engineering faculty require their students to participate in group projects (National Science Board, 2008) making pedagogies of engagement such as projectbased, problem-based, and team-based learning common practices in engineering classrooms (Smith, Sheppard, Johnson, & Johnson, 2005). When students work in teams they develop diverse knowledge and skills such as the ability to function in teams, learning how to design in teams, and learning new technical content. Consequently, the study of teamwork in the context of science and engineering education has been approached from different directions (See Figure 1). Some educators focused on the first category, learning to “work in teams.” Examples of such work are the quantitative studies on factors that affect team effectiveness (Imbrie, Maller, & Immekus, 2005) or qualitative studies based on observations of teams (Adams, Zafft, Molano, Rao, 2008). These studies are generally motivated by the calls of National Academy of Engineering (NAE, 2004; NAE, 2005) and the engineering programs accreditation body (ABET, 2007) suggesting that engineering students need to learn skills beyond the content knowledge. For example, ABET criterion 3d requires that engineering programs can demonstrate that their P ge 14188.2 students have "an ability to function on multidisciplinary teams." Thus, many engineering programs use teaming in their courses as a mechanism to achieve this outcome. Figure 1. A Typology of Research on Teams The second research category, “working in teams” to design have also been addressed in many studies. These studies have generally used qualitative research methods looking deep into the nature of team interactions (such as design process, team decision-making processes, and team member roles) and how these interactions develop (Tonso, 2007; Cross, Christiaans, Dorst, 1996; Zemke & Zemke, 2008; Yasar-Purzer, Henderson, McKay, Roberts, & de Pennington, 2008). Other researchers focused on the third category “working in teams” to learn and explored how collaborative teamwork support student learning of science and engineering concepts (not teaming and design skills as it is with the previous two categories). Many of these studies have historically shown that collaborative teamwork support learning (Schoeder, Scott, Tolson, Huang, & Lee, 2007; Johnson, Johnson, Halubec, 1998) and are more effective than traditional teaching methods in many ways. However, there is also a growing body of qualitative research studies showing that working in teams does not always lead to learning for all (Taconis, Ferguson-Hessler, and Broekkamp, 2001). These studies report social capital issues that limit students’ participation because of their gender, ethnicity, and social status (She, 1999; Southerland, Kittleson, Settlage, and Lanier, 2005; Zeldin & Pajares, 2000). While we know that students need to develop teamwork skills and that active engagement methods are more effective than the traditional methods in many aspects, our knowledge of how students interact in teams and how these interactions lead to learning is still limited. Therefore, this study aims to contribute to the engineering education literature by examining how students design and learn when they are working in teams. Theoretical Framework This study combines two learning theories, Bandura’s social cognitive theory (Bandura, 2001) and Vygotsky’s social constructivist theory (Vygotsky, 1978), to investigate the nature of student team interaction in the context of engineering. These theories have many commonalities as both define learning as an emergent result of human interactions. A key difference between the two theories is that social cognitive theory is more concerned about learner’s internalization process while social constructivist theory focuses more on the scaffolding the learner receives. According to Bandura, learning occurs as an emergent result of a dynamic relationship between human behavior, environment, and human agent (Bandura, 2001). Along with these interactions, Research on Teams Learning to “Work in Teams” “Working in Teams” to Design “Working in Teams” to Learn