Equity in Collaboration: My Ideas Matter, Too! K-12 Students' Negotiation of Social Status in Collaborative Engineering Teams (Fundamental Research)

摘要

Within pre-college (K-12) engineering education, the curriculum design integrates students working with partners or teams on projects as standard practice in the curriculum design. However, with a need to increase participation in engineering and other STEM career pathways, introducing engineering in pre-college settings has become a central avenue for access to STEM career pathways for many students. Pre-college learning experiences are opportunities to develop students' interests further and continually transform their identities. This period of development highlights the importance of introducing pre-college engineering activities to students that are engaging for all students and consider the needs of students from underserved, underperforming, or underrepresented populations in STEM fields. In pre-college settings, positive collaborative experiences situated with engineering concepts could promote interests and continued engagement with pathways to engineering careers. However, ineffective collaborative experiences may exacerbate equity issues (e.g., underrepresentation) in engineering classrooms which may deter any future participation with the discipline. The objective of this study is to understand how students', from low socioeconomic backgrounds, social positioning influences peer-to-peer relations and their status within an engineering team. Furthermore, we aim to explore how this position relates to their engagement with engineering concepts, practices, and habits. We expect the rich examples of how K-12 students experience status in collaborative engineering projects to inform curriculum design and instructional practice. The methods applied follow a case study approach where video-recorded observations of peer interactions and one-on-one interviews comprise the data in this case. The case is a two-week summer engineering camp for students in grades 6-8. In this case study, we conducted interaction analysis of the video data by coding peer-to-peer exchanges and the associated impact on the students' engagement in the engineering task. The results show that social status within collaborative teams manifests in three types of status-relevant interactions among students: taking authority, negotiating authority, or receiving direction from authority. The value placed on social positions taken up by team members resulted in both positive and negative impact on student engagement with the engineering concepts. The resulting impact shifted based on team dynamics throughout the project. The findings from this work illustrate how status is manifested in engineering teams by precollege students with limited to no formal training in collaboration. These illustrations help highlight how equity issues like underrepresentation of women or minorities can be further exacerbated by the pedagogical decisions of engineering educators. This exacerbation can directly influence the attitudes, perceptions, and interests of students in underrepresented groups which may prohibit their engagement in the future. The findings seek to provide examples of team dynamics for precollege engineering educators to help improve effective collaboration that promotes positive engineering experiences for students.