An Exploration Of Female Engineering Students' Functional Roles In The Context Of First-Year Engineering Courses

Female students encounter multiple challenges in engineering education,such as low persistence rate and low academic performance.Against this context,collaborative learning was proposed as a helpful strategy to increase female engineering students' self-efficacy.Nevertheless,researchers has found that female students in collaborative learning environments were usually faced with more difficulties than males and often devoted more efforts.In addition,female students' team performances were not as good as their male peers.To improve female engineering students' team performance,it is critical to gain a deep understanding on female students' team experience.In this study,I focus on investigating the functional roles of female engineering students in a collaborative learning context framed by Benne and Sheats' functional roles model(1956)as my theoretical framework and looked at how female engineering students performed the three roles specified in the model: task roles,social roles and individual roles.Using a phenomenographic approach,I explored twenty-one female engineering students' diverse functional roles in a collaborative learning environment in the context of first-year engineering courses.Qualitative interview data were collected and analyzed using Benne and Sheats' functional roles model as the guiding theoretical framework.Female engineering students' specific roles in the three dimensions were mapped through open-coding.Female engineering students in this study demonstrated a range of roles in group projects.Female students' task roles varied from task assistants,information-opinion givers,coordinators and initiator-contributors.In the dimension of social roles,females served as harmonizers,followers,gatekeepers,communication outsiders and other roles.As to the dimension of individual roles,some female students self-reported their roles of active participants and passive participants in working with a project group.This research examined female engineering students' functional roles in a group project context to understand their learning experience in a maledominant engineering course.The exploration of female students' functional roles provides an overall understanding about the effectiveness of collaborative project-based learning for female students.Implication for practice are also proposed to promote engineering curriculum design and improve female students' learning experience in project-based learning.