Socially Shared Regulation and Relational Reasoning in Engineering Design Teams: A Microgenetic Approach

• In Event: Data Mining and Self-Regulated Learning: Aligning Constructs With Measurement

Abstract

Purpose and Theoretical Framework
According to the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, engineers of today must possess both the requisite cognitive skills to excel in their profession (i.e., content knowledge, critical thinking) and the social capacities (i.e., communication, coordination) needed to work effectively with others (National Academy of Engineering, 2019). Despite these lofty goals, few researchers have addressed the interactions between cognitive and social factors in team functioning, or the temporal and dynamic nature of the processes that shape team performance (Paletz, Schunn, & Kim, 2012). This study seeks to contribute to the literature by examining the discourse of undergraduate engineering teams engaged in a design project for two constructs fundamental to learning and problem-solving: relational reasoning (RR), the ability to discern meaningful relations among objects, ideas, and situations (Alexander & the DRLRL, 2012); and socially-shared regulation (SSR), the monitoring and regulation of cognitive processes in an interactive problem-solving environment (Panadero & Jarvela, 2015).

Method
The sample included four teams of five to six members of undergraduate mechanical engineering students enrolled in a capstone design course. Over a period of three meetings, teams were tasked with conceptualizing ten viable ideas for a new product of their choosing, then narrowing ideas down to three, and finally to one, which they would ultimately prototype. Team meetings were audiotaped and videotaped. Researchers performed a content analysis of discourse to examine RR in the verbalizations and SSR in the types of questions the members posed (see Table 1). Social network analyses were used to illustrate co-occurrences between RR and SSM across team members. Finally, a sequence mining tool was used to identify patterns of RR and SSR as they occurred within and between meetings and teams.

Results
In terms of RR, results demonstrated proportionately more analogies when teams were generating ideas, versus more antinomies and antitheses while narrowing down ideas to more viable options. The sequence mining tool uncovered systematic co-occurrences between antinomies and analogies, and antinomies and antitheses, suggesting that an ability to distinguish between ontological categories can help when comparing designs based on either similarities or differences.
Pertaining to SSR, teams devoted a comparable portion of utterances to short-answer and task-oriented/metacognitive questions, while teams differed in proportions of questions that required more in-depth and extended responses. We perceive these differences as predictive of team performance, given that relational reasoning co-occurred most often with long-answer questions. Finally, temporal analysis of RR and SSR patterns revealed that teams tended to vacillate between periods of action and transition in which they engaged in reasoning and then collectively planned, monitored, and evaluated their behavior, which coheres with current models of team functioning (Marks et al., 2001).

Significance
This study addresses several gaps in the literature by providing evidence of socially-shared regulation in group discourse; linking cognitive and social dimensions of problem-solving, both of which are key for workplace success; and using innovative data mining and visualization techniques to explore the dynamic and temporal nature of team processes, thereby helping to advance models of team problem-solving.

Authors

• Sophie Jablansky, University of Maryland - College Park

• Patricia A. Alexander, University of Maryland - College Park

• Linda Schmidt