Using discourse analysis to understand "failure modes" of undergraduate engineering teams

In recent years, engineering education has been increasingly emphasizing teamwork to solve "real world" problems. However, teamwork as an educational tool has been called into question. Our study seeks to understand how team discourse constructs a unique team culture, established in the early stages of the teaming process. We investigated four co-ed teams of first-year engineering students in an introductory design course. Discourse analysis was used to break team discussions down into countable units for quantitative and qualitative analysis. We found that despite the preemptive team-related intervention regarding gendered role differentiation and the importance of pursuing individual learning goals, all four teams faced challenges in co-constructing knowledge within the first few weeks of the teaming process. Careful faculty scaffolding is needed to support team formation and maturation throughout the entire teaming processes to foster development of successful communication. We discuss the four "failure modes" encountered in this study as models-in-use and propose possible intervention approaches.