Scarlett Miller (center), Paul Morrow Professor of Engineering Design and Manufacturing in the Penn State College of Engineering, will lead a five-year, $1.4 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to improve the dynamics of student teams to encourage inclusivity and belonging. Credit: Poornima Tomy/Penn State.
Q&A: Can you encourage inclusivity by changing how students work together?
Principal investigator Scarlett Miller discusses new $1.4 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to scale engineering student team dynamics model
Oct 14, 2024
By Mariah Lucas
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Engineering programs have seen an increase in students from underrepresented communities in recent years, according to Scarlett Miller, Paul Morrow Professor of Engineering Design and Manufacturing in the Penn State College of Engineering (COE), which brings opportunities but also challenges in making sure every student feels valued, supported and empowered. An interdisciplinary team of researchers led by Miller was awarded a five-year, $1.4 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop and scale their inclusive student teaming model to multiple campuses and universities.
Miller will be joined by co-principal investigators Matt Parkinson, director of the Learning Factory and professor of engineering design and of mechanical engineering; Jessica Menold, associate professor of mechanical engineering and of industrial and manufacturing engineering; and Susan Simkins, professor of psychology in the College of the Liberal Arts.
Miller, who also is the inaugural director of Penn State’s Cocoziello Institute of Real Estate Innovation and a special adviser to the senior vice president for research, discussed the findings of the previous grant and her plans to scale it with Penn State News.
Q: This is a continuing grant from the NSF. Can you summarize the work that was accomplished in the first grant?
Miller: In our previous NSF-funded project, we studied over 500 first-year COE students broken into 135 design teams, and identified how team composition, communication patterns and psychological safety — the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking — affected how teams performed throughout the design process.
We found that teams with higher levels of psychological safety both produced and selected better concepts. We also found that a team’s gender composition mattered — specifically, men reported higher levels of psychological safety compared to women, and women perceived themselves as being less psychologically safe with their male colleagues. These results indicate a clear need for new educational programming around psychological safety, particularly as team diversity increases.
Q: Did your team translate these findings into educational practices?
Miller: We took our findings and developed and evaluated the impact of the Inclusive Teamwork for Engineering Advancement and Learning (INTEGRAL), which has now been integrated within the Penn State cornerstone and capstone design courses through the Learning Factory. To provide students with tangible actions that they could use in their teams, we developed and tested the “four lenses of psychological safety,” which assigns each team member a different role within their team for design activities. We found that teams who received the intervention had significantly higher psychological safety than those with no intervention, and teams who used the lenses more often over the course of the eight-week project had higher levels of psychological safety.
Q: How does this new grant expand this work?
Miller: The new grant will establish scalable findings across multiple campuses and universities. We are collaborating with the Georgia Institute of Technology to understand how best to leverage or modify the INTEGRAL training program to help support learners across Georgia Tech and Penn State, and across diverse campus sizes and locations, including the expansion of the curriculum to the Engineering Technology and Commonwealth Engineering program in the School of Engineering Design and Innovation.
Specifically, the INTEGRAL training will be expanded and scaled to include first-, second-, third- and fourth-year engineering design courses that leverage online learning modules to ensure sustainability across diverse educational environments.
This proposal excites me because it addresses what I perceive to be a critical need in the engineering community: developing validated, sustainable and scalable inclusive teaming models that foster a sense of belonging in undergraduate engineering communities for all students, to include changing how students work together in teams and how faculty engage with and support their students. In all, this work will touch more than 29,000 students at 12 campuses across the East Coast.
Q: What role do your interdisciplinary team members have in the success of the project?
Miller: Training engineers to work well in increasingly diverse teams requires an interdisciplinary lens. Our team will provide multiple lenses on the systems-level problems we’re trying to solve, as well as how these interventions can be integrated into existing educational frameworks.
As part of this grant, we will be working with 140 faculty members across Georgia Tech and Penn State to develop inclusive teaming training that they can facilitate through a train-the-trainer model. We have also partnered with WPSU to develop content, leveraging our multimedia strengths right here at Penn State.
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