Abstract
International teamwork skills are becoming more and more important for future engineers. Engineering projects with diverse students working towards solving an issue together could cultivate such skills. However, social exclusion may rise when faultlines emerge: dividing lines that split a group into relatively homogeneous subgroups. This study aimed at connecting diversity in student team structures to team member interaction patterns and their learning outcomes. By analyzing team meetings from a Dutch university master course (three teams with different diversity attributes), using orbital decomposition analysis, we found that particularly in Team 1, a Dutch male subgroup predominated the interactions, excluding the single female Chinese student. Though group grades were similar, individual affective outcomes differed. Educators should consider diversity influences during student teamwork and offer necessary facilitation.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 585-606 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| Journal | European Journal of Engineering Education |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2025 |
Funding
This work was supported by the Graduate School/Innovation Space, Eindhoven University of Technology, under Grant International Classroom [1005052]. The authors would like to express their gratitude to the course coordinator, Dr Jun Hu, and his students from the Department of Industrial Design for the support of the data collection at the Eindhoven University of Technology. We would like to express sincere thanks to the editors and the anonymous reviewers whose helpful comments have considerably improved the paper.
Keywords
- diversity in team structures
- Engineering teamwork
- sense of belonging
- team diversity
- team member interaction
