On the Nature and Use of Questions in Engineering Student Teams: Status and Power in Student Interactions

Background: Research on the ways that students’ interactions in collaborative, project-based learning has described how important learning opportunities, such as opportunities to contribute, implement, and refine ideas, must be negotiated amongst students in the learning environment. Such opportunities are subject to both overt and covert power dynamics that govern students’ behaviors and interactions during team-based, project-based learning.

Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this research was to examine the nature and function of questions in student design teams and their implications for students’ access to learning opportunity structures in team-based learning activities. Drawing on Status Characteristics Theory, this work examines how questions can reflect and reinforce power dynamics in student teams, thereby shaping students’ participation in team-based learning.

Design/Method: This ethnographic study drew on data from (a) ongoing observations of three focal student engineering design teams and (b) semi-structured interviews with members of each focal design team. In this paper, I analyzed fieldnotes and interview transcripts documenting the types of questions students asked, as well as their apparent influence on the interactional and communication dynamics in teams.

Results: Questions function beyond their commonly understood information-gathering functions, and students’ status in their teams shapes the meaning students make of questions in situated contexts. For example, when low-status students ask negative interrogatives, the questions were interpreted as requests for approval or hedging. However, when high-status students uttered negative interrogatives, they sentences were often interpreted as demands. Such differences have implications for students’ participation and, by extension, their learning.

Conclusions: Though some patterns of communication and interaction might be perceived as good engineering teamwork, instructors must be mindful of the ways that seemingly normal interactions may still reflect prohibitive power dynamics in student teams.