Collaborative (In)decision: A Preliminary Investigation of the Differences in Undergraduate Engineering Capstone Students' Collaborative Behaviors
Plain Language Summary
Engineering capstone courses place seniors from different majors on a single design team, and how well that collaboration goes often gets attributed to whether students display certain "collaborative behaviors": concrete actions like giving feedback or encouraging teammates. This study asked 24 students in one capstone course to sort a list of such behaviors, drawn from a widely used peer-assessment tool (CATME-B), from most to least frequently observed in their own groups. Technical behaviors, like demonstrating relevant skills, were seen as common by nearly everyone, while more interpersonal behaviors, such as giving specific feedback or checking in on a teammate's progress, were reported far less consistently and varied notably by gender and race. Because engineering programs often treat collaboration training as one-size-fits-all, these preliminary differences matter for how instructors design and support group work.
Contribution
Rather than treating collaborative behaviors as fixed, observable outputs, this pilot adapts a Q-Sort-style forced-ranking task to capture students' own perceptions of behavioral frequency, then disaggregates those rankings by gender and race to surface sociocultural variation that conventional peer- and self-report collaboration assessments tend to leave unexamined.
Research Questions
- Do senior-level capstone engineering students perceive differences in the frequency of collaborative behaviors within their collaborative groups?
- Do students' reported frequencies of collaborative behaviors vary by demographic subgroup, particularly gender and race/ethnicity?
Methods
24 students from a single senior-level interdisciplinary capstone course completed a Q-Sort-inspired online sorting task, arranging 16 CATME-B level-5 behavior statements — spanning contributing to the team's work, interacting with teammates, keeping the team on track, expecting quality, and relevant KSAs — into a forced quasi-normal distribution from "always" (–3) to "never" (+3) observed. Each behavior's placement was converted to a numeric score and averaged across the full sample as well as within gender (male/female) and race (White/non-White) subgroups; comparisons were descriptive only, since the small sample precluded statistical significance testing or the factor analysis and follow-up interviews typical of full Q methodology.
Key Findings
Technical/task-oriented behaviors were consistently reported as frequent across all subgroups (e.g., "demonstrates the KSAs to do excellent work"), while process-oriented items like giving specific, timely feedback were rated as rare by everyone. Divergence emerged on several behaviors: (e.g., "makes important contributions that improve the team's work") was reported more frequently by White and female students than by non-White and male students, and "makes sure teammates are making appropriate progress" showed a similarly gender and racial difference.
Implications
Process-oriented and interpersonal behaviors, unlike technical contributions, vary significantly among students. Engineering programs should explicit instruct, practice, and provide feedback for students about these behaviors, rather than assuming they incidentally develop in technical coursework. Follow-up research, including qualitative interviews and larger, more representative samples, should investigate why understand these differences occur.