Developing a Framework for Enhancing Pedagogical Practices for Teamwork in Undergraduate Engineering Education

Teamwork is central to modern engineering practice. Engineers must collaborate across technical disciplines, communicate with people who hold different expertise and perspectives, coordinate complex projects, manage conflict, and make decisions collectively. Employers consistently identify these abilities as essential, yet many engineering graduates enter the workforce without the level of teamwork proficiency expected of them. Undergraduate engineering programs therefore rely heavily on team-based assignments, but placing students in groups does not necessarily produce effective collaboration or meaningful learning. A single assignment may be expected to help students master technical content, develop communication and project-management skills, participate equitably, and experience conditions similar to professional engineering practice. These purposes may require different, and sometimes competing, instructional choices. However, the research that could guide instructors is dispersed across education, organizational management, and engineering education and often uses different definitions, measures, settings, and criteria for success. This project will bring these perspectives together to help instructors make more deliberate decisions about how teams are formed, supported, guided, and assessed. The resulting resources will help faculty respond to varied course contexts and student needs while addressing common challenges such as unbalanced participation, student isolation, unresolved conflict, and difficulty evaluating individual contributions. By improving the design and support of team-based learning, the project will strengthen undergraduate engineering education and better prepare future engineers for the collaborative demands of the national workforce. The project will develop and refine a framework that connects distinct teamwork-related learning objectives with appropriate pedagogical practices. It will pursue three integrated aims. First, a systematic review of empirical and foundational research across education, organizational management, and engineering education will identify teamwork goals, instructional strategies, assessment approaches, outcomes, and contextual conditions. The Input-Mediator-Outcome-Input model will be used to organize findings and examine how differences in terminology, measures, and settings contribute to apparent contradictions across studies. Second, semi-structured interviews will be conducted with 20 engineering instructors selected from respondents to the national Instructor Mindsets on Pedagogy and Attitudes toward Collaborative Teaming in Engineering survey. These interviews will investigate instructors’ priorities, rationales, assessment criteria, implementation challenges, institutional supports, and desired resources. Third, findings from the review and interviews will be synthesized into an adaptive framework that identifies core principles, context-dependent considerations, and decision pathways for instructional planning. The framework will be refined through feedback from 20 additional engineering faculty members, student focus groups, and industry focus groups. The project will contribute an interdisciplinary synthesis of teamwork research, empirical evidence about faculty decision making and resource needs, and a practical tool for analyzing and designing team-based learning environments. Classroom examples, a user guide, workshops, peer-reviewed publications, conference presentations, and openly available resources will support dissemination and adaptation across many engineering courses and institutions. This project is supported by NSF’s EDU Core Research (ECR) program and NSF's IUSE: EDU Program. The IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. Investments are made in critical areas that are essential, broad and enduring. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.