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

Manifestations of Social Power in Student Engineering Teams

The notion that status characteristics, such as race/ethnicity and gender, shape interactional outcomes (e.g., participation, influence) in small teams has been studied for decades (Berger et al., 1972). While applications to engineering student teamwork are relatively new, existing literature consistently demonstrates that teamwork in engineering is imbued with social power dynamics that legitimize some students while marginalizing others (Fowler & Su, 2018; Meadows & Sekaquaptewa, 2013; Seron et al., 2016; Tonso, 2007). For example, decades of research have found that women in engineering teams experience hostility in conversational dynamics, such as patterns of interruption, exclusion from access to the conversational floor, and even inequitable task allocation (Smith-Doerr et al., 2017). Similarly, existing research has demonstrated how racial/ethnic minoritized students often experience engineering teamwork as hostile, noting patterns by which their work and contributions are maligned because of perceptions about competence (Henderson, 2024a; McGee, 2021).

Importantly, in educational contexts, some social power dynamics escape the view of instructors both because their manifestations are internal to students, as well as because these interactional dynamics might occur outside of the classroom. For example, Fowler and Su (2018) described students’ academic orientations–students’ motivations for learning–as an underlying social power dynamic shaping students’ access to various learning opportunities. Students might exhibit performance avoidance orientations, wherein they avoid participating in classroom activities due to feelings of imposterism or out of fear of the social consequences of being wrong in front of classmates (Fowler & Su, 2018; Henderson, 2023). Women, in their view, might be more likely to report a performance-avoidance orientation. Still, this research views such dynamics as an issue of status—whereas some students have the space and opportunity to tinker and fail without social consequences (e.g., their teammates believing they are incompetent), others must navigate the sociotechnical interactions in design teams by actively avoiding such perceptions.

Other forms of social inequalities in student teamwork are also reported in the scholarly literature on team-based, project-based learning in engineering education. For example, Henderson (2024b) found that while racial/ethnic minoritized students contributed ideas at equal rates as their White counterparts, White students were more likely to be reported as having their ideas selected and enacted in engineering design teams. However, Henderson left open the question of whether enactment gaps were one of contribution (i.e., Black students’ ideas are used less often because they contribute fewer ideas), attribution (i.e., Black students’ ideas were used at equal rates, but that other students received credit for their ideas), or something else. Indeed, similar work on the experiences of women in teamwork settings has consistently found that women feel that their ideas are ignored or credited to men in their teams (Correll & Ridgeway, 2003).

Taken collectively, these findings suggest that reframing research on teamwork dynamics from deficit-based assumptions about students’ behaviors to an analysis of status and social power dynamics may be more informative for pedagogical decision making in student teams. For example, while there has been several decades of empirical research on “social loafing,” defined as scenarios in which students who are presumed to be slackers or free-loaders work less diligently in teams than they would had they been working alone (Barr & De Clerck, 2018; Moffat et al., 2024; Moffat et al., 2025; Pieterse & Thompson, 2010), this work begins from the assumption that students’ participation in teams is informed, in part, by the social construction of the learning environment, including social power dynamics in the complex interactions by which students negotiate ideation, task allocation, and engineering judgments.

Question Asking in Situated Contexts

Research characterizing the nature and use of questions across contexts variously describes how the constructions of interrogative sentences shape, and are shaped by, various elements of social context, with implications for interactional dynamics in teams. Yap and colleagues (2023) noted that questions function in interactional dynamics beyond information-seeking and confirming functions. Instead, questions can signal the question-asker’s (dis)affiliative stance. For example, in engineering teams, the question, “Did you change the length from 8 inches to 10 inches?” may be an earnest, yes-no interrogative seeking clarity about an unexplained change, a rhetorical question acknowledging a design change, or a disaffiliative move signaling disapproval of a change. Similarly, questions can signal an affiliative stance that de-escalate confrontations or threats. For example, in engineering teams, the question, “Do you think I should change the length from 8 inches to 10 inches?” may be an earnest, yes-no interrogative seeking feedback on a design change, a rhetorical question simply announcing one’s intentions to make a design change, or an affiliative move seeking to avoid conflict from making a contentious change. Interpretations of these questions must necessarily be couched in the sociotechnical context in which they occur.

To understand my interest in question asking as a status organizing process, I draw on two studies examining negative interrogatives in various contexts. Theorizing about the nature and function of various types of questions often points to the ways that social context shapes both when particular types of questions appear, as well as how those types of questions shape interactional dynamics. For example, Heritage (2002) described negative interrogatives—“questions beginning with such frames as ‘Isn’t it’, ‘Don’t you’, ‘Shouldn’t you’ etc.”—and examined the role of these types of negatively framed questions in news interviews. Heritage argued that negative interrogatives in the context of news interviews often functioned as assertions, allowing the interviewer to speak for the interviewee. Conversely, Aronsson (2018) studied negative interrogatives in the context of child custody hearings in courtrooms. Negative interrogatives in this context featured more heavily during cross-examination (i.e., the examination by the opponent attorney), functioning to establish what Aronsson called blame-account sequences.

While both Heritage (2002) and Aronsson (2018) acknowledge that negative interrogatives are argumentative, challenging, and potentially hostile in their nature, their findings suggest that the social context in which the negative interrogative is deployed shapes interactional dynamics and responses from the respondent. Whereas journalists are framed as acting ideologically neutral, opponent attorneys are designedly adversarial (Aronsson, 2018; Heritage, 2002). As such, negative interrogatives in news interviews often result in responses that are “couched in terms of agreement or disagreement with the interviewer” (Heritage, 2002, p. 1436), while responses in the child custody cases resulted in “an array of other devices, such as extreme case formulations, (ironic) rhetorical moves, and metacommunication that are all deployed for building up confrontations and hostility” (Aronsson, 2018, p. 49).

These research studies on the nature and function of interrogatives indicate that it is not the grammatical construction of interrogatives that shapes interactional dynamics, but how interrogatives are understood in situated contexts. Here, I return to Aronsson’s (2018) study of negative interrogatives in child custody examinations. Aronsson notes that “negative interrogatives might appear as a type of ‘neutral’ question,” and can be constructed as a polar yes-no question. However, the social context in which the question was delivered, combined with the inherently adversarial nature of the question asker (i.e., the opponent attorney), means that “respondents might still orient to the implicit hostile packaging” (p. 42). In such cases, whereas the question called for a single word answer (i.e., yes-no), the respondent might take up various defensive responses, such as excuse making or justification (Aronsson, 2018; Heinemann, 2008). These findings suggest that examining the grammatical form of the question alone, as documented in transcripts, may not capture the socially constructed interactional dynamics by which various types of questions function, and the meaning respondents make of questions in situated contexts, as captured in their verbal and behavioral responses. Thus, this research focuses on three types of questions that appeared in the data described herein: negative interrogatives, yes-no interrogatives (i.e., polar interrogatives that can be answered with yes or no), and, to a lesser extent, wh-interrogatives (i.e., those that begin with who, what, when, where, why, etc. that ask for specific information about a focal element) (Bocci et al., 2021; Heinemann, 2008; Huddleston, 1994; Raymond, 2003).

In educational contexts, research examining the nature and use of questions in the classroom suggests that the types of questions teachers ask students can impact the level and nature of students’ participation, thereby shaping important learning outcomes (Farahian & Rezaee, 2012; Koufetta-Menicou & Scaife, 2000). Importantly, the literature on question-asking in classroom contexts is often teacher-centered, focusing on the nature and use of the questions that instructors ask of students and the sociocognitive elements required of students to participate productively in the classroom (e.g., Eshach et al., 2013; Koufetta-Menicou & Scaife, 2000). However, this research was concerned with the social function of students’ questions in the context of design problem solving in student teams, where the process of communicating, negotiating, and selecting ideas is informed by social interactions, which themselves are imbued with racialized and gendered social power dynamics. These studies suggest a need to examine the nature and use of questions in student teams to understand how these questions function in the context of engineering design decision making, how they motivate individual and collective behaviors, and how they shape students’ access to specific learning opportunity structures in engineering team-based, project-based learning environments.

Theoretical Framework and Sensitizing Concepts

I drew on sensitizing concepts from status characteristics theory (SCT), which is a subtheory of expectation states theory (EST) (Correll & Ridgeway, 2003), for the theoretical framework in this study. Broadly, expectation states theory “was formulated to explain the emergence of differential power and prestige in task-oriented groups” (Fox & Moore, Jr., 1979, p. 126). Such power and prestige hierarchies are characterized by four observable, measurable individual team behaviors—the negotiated opportunities to participate in group activities (action opportunities), the opportunities for problem solving that result from action opportunities (performance outputs), communicated evaluations of one’s contributions (performance evaluations), and differences in one’s ability to utilize conscious or unconscious social pressures to change opinions, expectations, decisions, or behaviors (influence) (Fox & Moore, Jr., 1979; Simpson et al., 2012).

SCT extends expectation states theory by centering the role of diffuse and specific status characteristics possessed by team members in status organizing processes, here defined as the process by which evaluations of beliefs about diffuse and specific status characteristics become the bases of inequalities in social interactions (Berger et al., 1980; Fox & Moore, Jr., 1979). Whereas diffuse status characteristics (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender) reflect broader societal beliefs about performance expectations, such as the generally held belief that Whites and men are more competent engineers than Blacks and women (Dringenberg et al., 2022; Kant & Kerr, 2018), specific status characteristics (e.g., perceptions of one’s programming ability, mathematics ability) reflect traits germane to a limited, domain specific setting (Simpson et al., 2012).

Berger and Fisek (2006) note that the original SCT “was formulated to provide an account of how individuals use status information, such as gender, race, and occupational position to form expectations for each other” (p. 1038), which in turn shaped patterns of behaviors in teams and organizations. For example, in this view, diffuse status characteristics consist of four significant features: (a) a socially significant characteristic, such as race/ethnicity and/or gender, (b) varying states of the characteristic (e.g., male-female, White-Black-Latinx), (c) varying status evaluations related to social worth across contexts (e.g., that men are inherently more competent engineers than women), and (d) high and low conceptions of the capacities of the people who possess the different states (Berger & Fisek, 2006). The general premise of SCT is that status beliefs related to diffuse and specific status characteristics often translate into the individual and team-level behaviors of the group, namely, patterns of action opportunities, performance outputs, performance evaluations, and influence over interactional dynamics and team decision making (Bowman, 2013; Bianchi, 2010).

For example, Miles and Clenney (2010) depict one mechanism by which diffuse status characteristics can shape interactional dynamics, as well as team-level behaviors and outcomes (Figure 1). In their depiction, diffuse status characteristics, such as race/ethnicity or gender, inform perceptions of one’s status relative to others, which in turn shape perceptions of socially situated competence. That is, those who are perceived to have greater status due, in part, to socially held beliefs related to race and gender, are also likely to be perceived as more competent during team-based learning activities. Moreover, perceptions of status also influence the degree to which one’s efforts to exert influence, make assertive decisions, or perform other actions that reinforce status, are perceived as legitimate. For example, team members might respond differently to a higher status student who challenges ideas than they would a lower status member due to perceptions that the higher status member’s concerns are more legitimate. Finally, perceptions of competence and perceived legitimacy leads higher status members to “have more success and less resistance when they apply a broader gamut of tactics and strategies” (Miles & Clenney, 2010, p. 139), leading higher-status students to better balance competition and cooperation. That is, male students who are perceived as competent can employ strategies, such as assertively questioning and challenging teammates’ ideas, that position their own ideas as more favorable—strategies that women might be punished for should they attempt to employ similar tactics—leading to more effective team negotiation outcomes for men.

Figure 1

In engineering education research, explanations of racial/ethnic, gender, and race-gender differences in students’ learning experiences are explained using pathological terms (e.g., “Women are more likely to prioritize avoiding conflict, and thus defer to male counterparts”) rather than critiques of the social construction of the learning environment. For example, Bear and Woolley (2011) described a meta-analysis of gender differences in interpersonal communication in teams, arguing that such differences were attributable, in part, to interpersonal styles. They explain that whereas men were more authoritative, exhibiting behaviors such as giving orders, women were more democratic, focusing their attention on full participation (Bear & Woolley, 2011, p. 148). Such a description ignores the role that the social construction of status differences plays in shaping individual behaviors and interactional dynamics.

Instead, Miles and Clenney (2010) describe status, and the social power dynamics that status differences entail, as the key antecedent of the social inequities (e.g., racial/ethnic and gender differences) often visited in research on teamwork. Here, I note that status, power, authority, and influence are related, but different, concepts in the context of examining team working dynamics (Table 1). According to EST and SCT, differences in status characteristics result in differential status (i.e. the antecedent), which is manifested in differential power, authority, and influence (i.e., the consequences) via status organizing processes. In engineering teams, diffuse status characteristics, such as whether one is White and/or male, might result in normative beliefs about competence, resulting in the ability of the White, male student to exert more power and authority over team decisions, such as task allocation and decision making.

Finally, status, and the patterns of influence and authority that descend from one’s relative status, is not a static characteristic of individuals, but rather a dynamic interactional component of team working relationships. That is, individuals enter teams with expectations for status and related authority and influence, but one’s status, power, authority, and influence over team interactions and decisions can be influenced by one’s own, and others’, behaviors (Karpowitz & Mendelberg, 2014; Miles & Clenney, 2010). For example, Henderson (2024b) described patterns of gender homophilythe tendency for women to choose other women as working partners—as a strategic behavior women adopted to gain authority and influence over various project components. These behaviors included clearing the conversational floor for other women, as well as communicating outside of the formal teamwork environment to garner support for ideas (Henderson, 2023, 2024b), with the effect of elevating other women’s influence over teamwork processes. This research examined patterns of question-asking as one mechanism by which students sought to enhance their own, or detract from others’, patterns of authority and influence in engineering teams.

Positionality

My interest in studying power dynamics in engineering teams stems from both my own experiences navigating engineering design team discussions, as well as my experiences teaching engineering design courses. As a Black, male student, I found myself organizing my behaviors around anticipating the types of questions that might be weaponized to delegitimize my contributions to engineering teams. That is, I recognized that some questions were not earnest attempts to understand my work, but hostile attempts to undermine my ideas and contributions. As an instructor, I began to notice similar patterns, but I also recognized that my undergraduate students, like my younger self, likely lacked the language to explain the patterns of exclusion and marginalization they experienced in teams. For example, one student, a man of color, articulated the seemingly unfair scrutiny his ideas received as an issue of accountability—while some students are accountable to their ideas, requiring them to develop ideas and respond to questions adequately to be heard in their teams, other students were unaccountable, free to “throw ideas against the wall” during team discussions. In my work, I came to understand this dynamic as an issue of social power that, like other issues of social power, was associated with race/ethnicity, gender, and other dimensions of the social identity. This work began from the premise that one’s ability to ask questions, as well as the types of questions one asks of others, is informed by one’s relative status in collaborative social environments.

Setting

The setting for this study was a cornerstone design course (Design1) delivered to first-year engineering students at a large, public, Midwestern university. In full, the course consisted of three components: a lecture component during which students learned about concepts from the engineering sciences that would support their design decision making, a technical communications session during which students learned principles of engineering communication, and a laboratory session during which students implemented their design concepts.

Team Selection

The course consisted of 12 teams of four or five students. While the 12 teams all participated in the two lecture sections together, the teams were divided across three technical communications and laboratory sections. As a result, I selected one focal team from each section of the course for inclusion in the study. Team selection for this research was guided, in part, by Harrington’s (2003) discussion of access, entry, and rapport in ethnographic research. That is, while I was not an instructor in the course, I recognized that students may interpret my presence in the classroom, as well as my relationships with course instructors, through an instructor-student prism. As a result, I informed students that I would have no effect on their course grades and that nothing they said or did in my presence would be reported to course instructors prior to grade submissions. Additionally, I informed students that only teams for which all team members agreed to participate would be considered for inclusion in the study. After eight of the 12 teams agreed to participate, I selected teams based on racial/ethnic and gender diversity, amongst other factors discussed elsewhere.

Participants

Below, I describe each team (Table 2), drawing on episodes from my fieldnotes, as well as students’ characterizations of their teammates during interviews. While readers might use these characteristics to label students “high status” or “low status,” I draw on my theoretical framework, which describes status as dynamic and evolving, and avoid such labels. As such, my descriptions of students that refer to status reflect in situ perceptions rather than static, immutable characteristics of the students.

Below, I characterize each team by describing the role of diffuse and specific status characteristics in each team’s interactional dynamics, task allocation, and decision making.

Data Sources

This work draws on two data sources: ongoing observations of the three focal design teams that were documented in fieldnotes and post-experience interviews with the members of each of the design teams. Specifically, I used an open-ended observation protocol, which was designed around the four behavioral sequences (i.e., action opportunities, performance outputs, performance evaluations, and influence) in SCT. For example, the section of the observation protocol that captured action opportunities asked, “In what ways does the team delegate action opportunities?” and “In what ways do students try to appropriate or avoid action opportunities on the team?” Similarly, the section on influence asked, “In what ways do students exert influence over individual and team behaviors? Are they successful?” and “In what ways do students seem to control information flows on the team (e.g., who asks what questions and how)? As I observed teams during my observations, I documented the questions students asked (e.g., of themselves, of their teammates, of authority figures) in their design process, as well as how other team members responded to various question types. From these questions and responses, I developed suppositions about students’ intentions, the effects of various question types, and the role of status. I documented these suppositions in reflective memos, which I returned to during the data analysis process described below.

In this research, as a matter of both reflexive practice (i.e., following up on my presuppositions, assumptions, and speculations) and trustworthiness (i.e., engaging in a form of member checking), I returned to my speculations and deductions about intentions and results during individual interviews to ascertain the degree to which my speculations and deductions aligned with participants in the study. During one-on-one interviews, I returned to specific incidents over the course of the project, asking students to recall how events unfolded, their intentions, and any resulting events that might have occurred out of my view. In later sections of this document, I discuss how specific events unfold and the role of various question types in how those events unfolded, students’ recollections about intentions and effects, as well as findings about the nature and use of questions and their effects on interaction dynamics in student teams.

Trustworthiness

I engaged in three broad strategies to ensure trustworthiness of the findings. First, I engaged in data triangulation by collecting and analyzing multiple forms of data (Denzin, 2017), including observations and interview data. I engaged in a process of member checking during the interview process (Maxwell, 2013), where I asked students to review my descriptions of them, including their relative contributions to their team. Finally, as the data collection, analysis, and interpretation of findings entailed a single researcher, I engaged in several strategies for reflexive engagement by documenting the data collection and analysis process in reflective memos, as well as soliciting feedback from scholars across disciplines about my analysis interpretations of findings.

Eliciting Elaboration: Indicator of Status or “Good Engineering Teamwork”?

While the focus of this research was examining how questions functioned as a mechanism for exerting influence over team discussions and decisions, I begin by acknowledging that many questions served a straightforward social function of eliciting information, affirmation, or context-sensitive responses from referent others. Throughout my observations, I documented how these questions were a form of idea uptake that both signaled at least initial support for an idea, as well as granted teammates an opportunity to clarify or elaborate on ideas. For example, I documented a meeting of The Yachtsmen during which the team began to finalize their ROV design:

While the questions Kyle (White, male) received are, by definition, forms of influence over his behaviors—he changed his process for sketching dimensions after the series of questions—the questions themselves were earnest requests for information and clarification. This process ensured the team had a shared understanding and model of their design during their discussion. The questions students asked also appeared to play an important role in students’ learning as they co-constructed knowledge in their teams. For example, as students allocated tasks on their teams, it was often the case that others might review their work, probing for accuracy or clarification:

Students described these types of interactions as indicators of good teamwork, suggesting that opportunities to elaborate on ideas ensured all their decisions were rational and not based on “random speculation” (Addy, Black female, Team Mobula), thereby avoiding stubborn “buckling down” (John, White, male, The Yachtsmen) on one’s ideas (Henderson, 2023). Still, elsewhere (Henderson, 2023), I critique the underlying assumption that these types of questions are inherently indicators of good engineering teamwork. For example, I argue that one’s ability to ask for, even demand, justifications for another’s ideas is informed by social power. This was evident during one contentious meeting of Team Surge. As the team discussed their ROV frame design, a dispute over the placement of joints emerged regarding the placement of the team’s limited “hollowed-out” joints, which I documented in my fieldnotes.

Decades of research have established how linguistic modifiers can shape the social impact of statements and questions, as well as the ways modifiers can serve dual functions in dyadic interactions (Blumm-Kulka, 1985). For example, Hyland (2000) notes that “hedges such as might, probably, and seem can both signal a tentative assessment” as well as “convey collegial respect for the views of colleagues” (p. 179). Rehman’s (Asian, male) use of the modifier “even” in the question, “How do you even know that?” marked it as different from Ryan’s (White, male) question, “How did you get that number, though?” above. That is, Ryan’s use of the modifier “even” served the dual function of indicating disapproval, as well as undermining Stephanie’s (White, female) ideas during the team discussion.

Still, this exchange underscores the need to understand questions in situated contexts beyond their grammatical form, as well as the role of diffuse status characteristics in the ways these modifiers are understood in social context. Rehman’s demand for a response from Stephanie was both an earnest question in search for a legitimate answer, as well as a mechanism for signaling disapproval and disagreement. Moreover, when I asked students to reflect on these heated exchanges, as well as the role of diffuse status characteristics such as gender, students acknowledged the role of gender in these interactional dynamics (Henderson, 2023). Rehman acknowledged that he felt like “the woman thing definitely played a role in our team’s dynamics,” including the ways project goals and design decisions were communicated between team members.

I point to this episode to suggest that even earnest questions are imbued with social power that are informed by diffuse and specific status characteristics. Who is afforded opportunities to ask questions, the types of questions they ask, and how others respond reflects both the nature of social context, as well as the nature of the activities in which students are engaged. Rehman’s demand for justification from Stephanie reflected the ambiguous, ill-defined nature of engineering design activities, as well as his and Stephanie’s social position in his team.

Status Influences on the Role of Yes-No Interrogatives

Raymond (2003) described yes-no interrogatives as perhaps the most pervasive practice in social interactions. Indeed, yes-no interrogatives featured heavily in team discussions, setting a wide range of sociotechnical behaviors in motion during team interactions. At their most basic level, yes-no interrogatives served the simple social function of eliciting affirmation, approval, refutation, or disapproval, thereby distributing knowledge during team discussions.

Still, other incidents pointed to the social functioning of yes-no interrogatives and the role of status. For example, during his interview, Matt, a White, male student who was described as Team Mobula’s “de facto team leader,” discussed how Kevin, his Asian, male teammate, would avoid voicing disapproval in the team, opting instead to send Matt private messages seeking to win Matt’s support for making changes to the team’s work. When I asked Matt for an example of such a message, he recalled:

Just as the modifier “even” altered the social impact of the question Rehman asked of Stephanie, the modifier “really” in Kevin’s question similarly modified Matt’s understanding of the nature of Kevin’s question. Kevin’s question functioned to signal his (dis)affiliative stance on his team’s presentation. Moreover, the context of the question also helps underscore the function of the question in the team. Importantly, Kevin chose to voice his disapproval to the team’s “de facto leader” in an effort to exert influence over the team’s presentation. Moreover, the meaning Matt (White, male) made of the exchange–that Kevin was seeking to avoid conflict by winning his support– suggests Matt understood that the question demanded more than a yes-no response. In this description, a relatively lower status student used a yes-no interrogative towards a higher status member as a social resource to exert influence over a team assignment, in part, by enlisting a higher status member in support of their ideas. Again, the grammatical form and content of the question, as well as the social context of the question, helps illuminate the meaning and impact of the question in the team’s communication dynamics.

In my fieldnotes, I regularly documented moments in which students used yes-no interrogatives to (re)direct conversations, signal support, opposition, or disapproval, thereby precipitating the uptake or discarding of ideas. For example, prior to one laboratory activity, each student was asked to complete a “pre-lab” assignment in which they prepared a “concept vessel” –an example frame that teams would construct to gain practice using laboratory equipment. I documented Team Mobula’s process for choosing a concept vessel in my fieldnotes:

This incident underscores the difference between grammatical form and the social meaning and function of interrogatives. Clearly, Addy understood the initial interrogative sentence as one seeking affirmation and perhaps expected that her affirmative response would assuage concerns about her concept vessel. However, as I observed the interaction between Team Mobula, I began to understand the initial yes-no interrogative beyond its grammatical form that suggested a desire for an affirmative response, instead understanding the question to be the beginning of a process of discarding Addy’s concept vessel. While the teaching assistant had encouraged the students to consider workshopping their concept vessels, even setting aside class time for students to refine or combine a vessel for the laboratory session, the team’s time spent on Addy’s vessel was instead entirely criticism, leading Team Mobula to discard the idea.

Second, this incident points to the interaction of social power and question asking. I asked: Who gets to ask questions? Who is required to answer them? Whose ideas are scrutinized? And whose ideas escape scrutiny? I returned to these types of incidents during interviews with members of Team Mobula in questions about their trust in other teammates, as well as their reflections on this specific incident. Elsewhere (see: Henderson, 2023), I reported on the team’s “implicit trust” of Kevin due to their perceptions of his competence. Consequently, Kevin’s concept vessel appeared to escape the scrutiny Addy received—I documented no questions related to Kevin’s concept vessel prior to the laboratory teaching assistant’s intervention. Conversely, teammates acknowledged that others “did not have a lot of trust in Addy” (Matt’s words, speaking of interactions with Kevin, which Kevin confirmed), even early in the project. Thus, the yes-no interrogative became a manifestation of that distrust in Addy’s competence and work, as well as the implicit trust in Kevin’s work, that precipitated the discarding of Addy’s ideas. Max, for example, shared of the team’s lack of scrutiny for Kevin’s concept vessel:

In this research, I suggest that questions were one way that assumptions related to performance expectations were manifested in students’ teams. Low-status students, whose work was less trusted than that of others, fielded and responded to yes-no interrogatives that scrutinized their work. Conversely, high-status students were less scrutinized. Such discrepancies in scrutiny have implications for students’ learning. For example, while it may have been true that Addy’s design failed to meet some constraint, opportunities to respond to scrutiny, review, and revise the design might have been an excellent learning opportunity for the entire team. Moreover, the additional scrutiny of Kevin’s design might also have been an excellent learning opportunity. Instead, students missed both potential learning opportunities.

While the previous incident pointed at the role of diffuse status characteristics, importantly, diffuse status characteristics, such as race and gender, were not always the distinguishing feature of high and low status. Specific status characteristics related to technical skills gained from prior experiences also appeared to shape status hierarchies in teams. For example, members of the Yachtsmen, the all-White, male team in the study, acknowledged awareness of their own and others’ skills from prior experiences, such as Cam’s extensive skills with CAD modeling, Kyle and Paul’s prior fabrication experiences, and John’s coding skills. Seth, however, acknowledged that his lack of technical skills relative to his teammates left him avoiding some tasks and deferring to other teammates, particularly in tasks related to developing the team’s CAD model. As such, during design discussions, I noted Seth’s tendency to use less authoritative language, instead using yes-no interrogatives and negative interrogatives, which I discuss in the next section, to insert ideas, redirect conversations, and exert influence over team decisions.

For example, during a team meeting of the Yachtsmen, I documented how Seth used yes-no interrogatives to insert, then reassert, ideas about thruster placement that had been discussed, but discarded, during a prior meeting. In my fieldnotes, I wrote:

Initially, I called these types of yes-no interrogatives “questioning for approval” and documented how they tended to originate from lower status members of the teams. I asked: Who has to ask these questions? Whose response is necessary for the team to proceed? How does the social function of these questions reflect power dynamics in the team? In a similar incident during a team meeting in which The Yachtsmen were completing a team presentation, I documented how Kyle, who I viewed as a high-status member of the team, made changes to team’s slides unilaterally, while Seth repeatedly asked yes-no interrogatives that sought approval to proceed:

Seth’s use of yes-no interrogatives appeared to direct and redirect team discussions at times when his ideas were not necessarily under threat but not fully being acknowledged. Thus, Seth’s use of yes-no interrogatives directed at higher status members of the team appeared to be a mechanism for him to exert influence over team discussions, behaviors, and decisions during team meetings and activities.

The source of yes-no interrogatives appeared to shape the social function of these types of questions in engineering teams. When directed from high status members to low status members in situ, yes-no interrogatives often served a delegitimizing social function, signaling opposition to an idea and precipitating the discarding of that idea. Conversely, when directed from low status members to high status members in situ, yes-no interrogatives signaled support for an idea or behavior, as well as a desire for approval from higher status members. That is, yes-no interrogatives allowed relatively low-status members to insert, and reassert, previously discarded ideas, thereby exerting influence over team behaviors and decisions.

Conversely, when relatively high-status members used yes-no interrogatives, their questions appeared to precipitate challenges and the discarding of ideas and contributions more directly. Team members appeared to interpret yes-no interrogatives from high-status members as authoritative suggestions or demands that signaled disapproval. These moments constituted more direct, authoritative influences over team contributions and engineering decisions than when low-status members used yes-no interrogatives. For example, I documented an exchange between Kyle (The Yachtsmen) and John regarding John’s contributions to a technical communication assignment:

Kyle’s question was clearly not an earnest question for an explanation of John’s writing choices. Indeed, John clearly understood the question to be a command to revise his writing, as his immediate response indicated his awareness of the social meaning of Kyle’s question. This was laid bare when, after Seth’s suggestion that Kyle’s pointed suggestion was “not a big deal,” Kyle turned his authoritative, but suggestive, question into a more direct suggestion that the bullet points be written into a paragraph. These incidents demonstrate how similar interrogative sentences can be interpreted differently based on the speaker’s status and the social context in which the sentences were uttered.

Status Implications for the Use of Negative Interrogatives in Student Teams

Heritage (2002) noted that negative interrogatives–questions that begin with frames such as “Isn’t it…,” “Doesn’t this…,” and “Don’t you…”—are “not always understood as questioning in the information seeking sense” (p. 1428). Instead, negative interrogatives can function to signal the speaker’s (dis)affiliative stance (Yap et al., 2023). However, this research extends those findings by analyzing the nature and use of negative interrogatives as a reflection of students’ relative status in teams. That is, just as status appeared to inform when, and to what effect, students used yes-no interrogatives, findings indicated that students’ relative status may shape when they deploy negative interrogatives in collaborative teams, as well as how referent others make meaning of and respond to those questions, thereby shaping interactional dynamics in student teams.

For example, during one team meeting of Team Mobula, Chelsea (White, female) and Addy (Black, female) noticed Matt (White, male) had changed their work on the team’s upcoming presentation without their knowledge. As the team reviewed Addy’s slides, Addy noticed small changes, interjecting with, “Wait. Who keeps changing my slides?” While the team acknowledged that small changes (e.g., to the colors, the bullet points) were trivial, as the meeting continued and it became clearer that more substantive changes had been made to the slides, Chelsea decried the changes in an exchange I documented in my fieldnotes:

Chelsea’s negative interrogative served at least two purposes related to the interactional dynamics in Team Mobula. First, Chelsea was expressing disapproval of the inaccuracy of Matt’s changes. While Matt had made changes that he thought would make the slides more legible, Chelsea believed the control box in the slides did not accurately reflect the control box in real life. Second, Chelsea’s negative interrogative expressed disapproval of Matt’s behaviors without directly challenging Matt explicitly. During her interview, Chelsea reflected on this pattern of behaviors from Matt, her frustration at the implication of Matt’s behavior on her perceived competence, noting that “being a girl in engineering, it’s really irritating when men just do my work for me” (Henderson, 2023).

In my analysis, I documented how the avoidance of authoritative language appeared to be a pattern amongst students who held lower relative status in team discussions, as well as a general tendency to use negative interrogatives to express disapproval. For example, in my fieldnotes, I documented Seth’s tendency to avoid authoritative language, turning instead to negative interrogatives to insert ideas, offer feedback, or redirect team conversations. For example, during one team meeting, The Yachtsmen, led by Kyle, began to sketch preliminary ideas about the team’s ROV on a wall-mounted, erasable white board. As Kyle began to discuss dimensions of the team’s frame, he sketched the placement of the team’s thrusters inside the frame. At that moment, Seth interjected with a negative interrogative–“Aren’t we putting the thrusters on the outside?”

In my fieldnotes, I documented how this was at least the third time Seth had urged the team to mount the thrusters on the outside of the frame. However, I was perturbed by the way that he moved the team’s discussion; rather than make an authoritative suggestion to the team about his position on thruster placement, as his teammate Kyle routinely did, Seth asked a negative interrogative. During his interview, Seth acknowledged his tendency to show deference around idea sharing, offering that, while he was comfortable sharing ideas, he preferred to defer in moments during which other team members appeared settled on ideas:

While both high- and low-status members of the teams utilized negative interrogatives, their effects on team interactional dynamics differed starkly. When relatively low-status members utilized negative interrogatives, the social function of the negative interrogative left space for high-status members to disagree. Students who acknowledged relatively lower status on their teams appeared to turn to negative interrogatives to navigate their team’s interactional dynamics, positioning their questions in ways that minimized the opportunity for direct conflict. These moments constituted passive mechanisms by which low-status members appeared to exert influence over team discussions and engineering decisions.

The use of negative interrogatives in engineering teams, and the social meaning and function of those sentences in situ, appeared to be related to the status of both the speaker and subject of the sentence. Like other forms of interrogative sentences, the relative status of individuals in the team shaped how the question functioned in the team. However, while both high- and low-status students used negative interrogatives to make statements about their (dis)affiliative stances on team contributions and decisions, negative interrogative sentences were understood to be authoritative suggestions when spoken by high-status students. Conversely, negative interrogatives were understood to be less authoritative suggestions when spoken by relatively lower-status students.

Distinguishing Good Teamwork from Acts of Social Power: A Distinction without a Cause?

The goal of this research was to examine how questions functioned as a mechanism for exerting influence over team discussions and decisions, which I presupposed has implications for students’ access to learning opportunities in engineering design teams, as well as to characterize the influences of diffuse and specific status characteristics on interactional dynamics in student teams. As a matter of reflexive practice (i.e., subjectivist, intertextual reflexivity, Denzin, 1997), I discussed the findings from this research with other engineering education research scholars. Two alternative explanations emerged from these discussions, both of which were exhibited in the qualitative, interview data discussed above. On one hand, colleagues and collaborators argued that the patterns of questioning that I documented might be signs of good engineering teamwork. After all, collaborative and cooperative learning activities are designed to position students to co-construct knowledge, making question asking and collaborative reasoning important learning activities (van Boxtel et al., 2000). On the other hand, colleagues argued that assessing design ideas and other contributions for correctness is also a key learning experience, and moments of scrutiny may themselves be excellent learning opportunities. As Addy (Black, female, Team Mobula) noted, at times, scrutiny helped identify mistakes that she might have missed, meaning that moments of scrutiny may have supported, not hindered, Addy’s learning.

As I engaged in these reflexive discussions with students, colleagues, and collaborators, I began to notice a throughline in these alternative explanations. My use of terms like “social power,” as well as my association of social power with diffuse status characteristics like man-ness and Whiteness, elicited assumptions of intentional identity-based malice or (un)intentional harm on the part of those who possess and deploy social power over those who are subject to that power. Thus, I wish to caution the reader—it is not my intention to assign any value judgments to the students participating in this research, nor do I contend that the acts of social power I documented necessarily caused discernible harm to other students. Indeed, while students pointed to moments of frustration and conflict, all of the students in the study described their experiences as generally positive and spoke about the knowledge and skills they gained–both technical engineering knowledge and sociotechnical knowledge such as how to communicate and work in teams–from their participation in the project.

Instead, my discussion of social power is intended to describe how diffuse and specific status characteristics, the performance expectations associated with those characteristics, and the behavioral sequences that result from those characteristics and expectations, underlie the “rules of engagement” for each student, and how those rules differ for each of the students in ways that have material consequences for their participation in teams. Findings from this research suggest these dynamics shape who asks questions, when students ask questions, the manner in which they ask questions, and the effects of one’s questions on the team’s discussions and decision making. For example, while it might be true that Kevin’s scrutiny of Addy’s work might have afforded Addy opportunities to review, describe, and refine her work, that Addy was not positioned to scrutinize Kevin’s work in the same way inherently means that equitable learning opportunities are missed in student teams, even when malice, hostility, and harm are absent in the interactional dynamics.

This might be why research typically documents only the most jarring examples of racialized and gendered hostilities in teams (e.g., racialized and gendered microaggressions, differential rates of access to the conversational floor) (Dickerson et al., 2021). By extension, interventions to support equitable learning opportunities for historically excluded students tend to focus on identifying and mitigating the overt hostilities commonly visited in the literature (Dickerson et al., 2021; Isaac et al., 2023). Results from this research should extend the definitions of social power beyond those examples of overt, malicious social bias to other, more covert manifestations of social power that still shape students’ participation in team-based learning activities. Indeed, while students in this study pointed to moments in which women were interrupted, other teammates were excluded, or ideas were not taken up, explicit acts of social power were less frequently discussed. Less visited are the more subtle mechanisms of social power that shape interactional and communication dynamics, task allocation, idea contributions, and idea selection in student teams.

Questions and Patterns of Influence in Student Teams

Findings from this research extend findings from other studies examining interactions in science and engineering learning environments in two ways. First, this research describes how one specific element of students’ interactions—questions—shape patterns of influence in student teams. Second, this research describes how socially significant elements of identity (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender) might shape the form and function of students’ questions in their teamwork experiences in engineering.

Engle and colleagues (2014) described influence as “the dynamic outcome of social negotiations” and, in line with the definition of influence provided by Simpson and colleagues (2012), described mechanisms by which students might “convince others to adopt, weaken, strengthen, or change their position on the primary issue being discussed” (p. 250). They posit that four components underlie the mechanisms by which students exert influence over team discussions—the negotiated merit of each student’s argument, each student’s intellectual authority, each student’s access to the conversational floor, and each student’s degree of spatial privilege. Such a framework might help explain why, for example, some students gain undue influence over team decisions despite a relative lack of scrutiny of their ideas when compared to other students in their team (see: Kevin, Team Mobula).

Chindanon and Koretsky (2023) drew on Engle and colleagues’ (2014) framework to study patterns of influence in the specific context of engineering team meetings in an industrially situated virtual laboratory. Importantly, Chindanon and Koretsky described a “problematize” code as moments in which students “create awareness of the situation by raising questions such as ‘Why do you think that?’” (p. 153), pointing to question asking as an important element of students’ interactions in their teams. However, this research extends Chindanon and Koretsky’s analysis by examining how different types of questions function in the context of student teams, as well as how that functioning is shaped by the social positioning of the specific question asker.

Initially, as I documented the types of questions students asked during their team meetings, I assumed that students with different levels of status might ask different types of questions. For example, I posited that high-status students might be more likely to ask negative interrogatives that signaled their disapproval of a lower-status teammate’s ideas. However, I found that it was not that students with different levels of status asked different types of questions—high-status students appeared as likely to ask negative interrogatives as their lower status teammates. Rather, the effect of the question on interactional and communication dynamics appeared to be related to the relative status of the question asker and respondent. That is, students position themselves as agents within design teams based on their knowledge, skills, beliefs, and learning goals relative to other students in their teams. Here, I draw on Harré and Van Langenhove’s (1991) definition of position/positioning as “the discursive construction of personal stories that make a person’s action’s intelligible and relatively determinate as social acts.” They note that one can “position themselves or be positioned as e.g., powerful or powerless, confident or apologetic, confident or submissive, definitive or tentative” (p. 395).

Findings from this research suggest that questions in situated contexts are one mechanism by which students position themselves, or are positioned, as agents within teams. When positioned as “de facto leaders” in student teams, yes-no interrogatives can be interpreted as demands, while similar yes-no interrogatives are interpreted as suggestions or requests for affirmation from those positioned as lower status team members. Similarly, negative interrogatives, when uttered by students positioned as lower status team members might be interpreted as passive criticisms or requests for clarification, while negative interrogatives uttered by those positioned as high-status team members might be interpreted as demands. Indeed, in this study, when high-status students asked negative interrogative questions of relatively lower-status teammates, others often understood the question as a signal of disapproval, initiating a sequence of interactions that frequently ended with ideas being discarded. Conversely, when lower-status students asked negative interrogatives of their higher status teammates, responses were more likely to include clarification, defensiveness, and idea uptake.

Additionally, while Engle and colleagues (2014) and Chindanon and Koretsky (2023) point to the role of elements such as gender, this research extends these studies by considering how socially significant elements of students’ identities might shape the interactional dynamics of the team. Research has long acknowledged that elements such as individual intellectual authority and access to the conversational floor are shaped by diffuse status characteristics such as race, gender, socioeconomic status, and so on (Karpowitz & Mendelberg, 2014). Such research has documented differential rates of participation, often measured in the number of utterances afforded to individuals during team discussions. However, while existing studies have focussed on the content of utterances during team meetings (Casakin et al., 2015; Hirshfield & Koretsky, 2018), this research focuses attention on the differential impact of those utterances on teamwork dynamics in situ.

Finally, while scholars have paid some attention to diffuse status characteristics, such as race and gender, in engineering education scholarship on teamwork dynamics (Fowler & Su, 2018; Henderson, 2023, 2024a, 2024b; Hirshfield & Koretsky, 2018; Joshi, 2014; Rodriguez-Simmonds, 2023), this research suggests students also make social meaning of their perceptions of their and their teammates’ prior engineering experiences as important social indicators of competence and performance expectations. Elsewhere, I describe how these perceptions resulted in patterns of task allocation, where students who were perceived to be experts in a particular task might be more likely to be allocated that task during team negotiations (Henderson, 2024b; Joshi, 2014). Moreover, I described how those perceptions are themselves imbued with gendered performance expectations, where, for example, women might be more likely to underrate their technical skills relative to men on their teams, thereby decreasing the likelihood that they will be allocated technical tasks. Findings from research suggest that perceptions of skills also shape interactional dynamics, including the types of questions students ask and are asked during the process of scrutinizing ideas, how responses to questions are manifested, and the effects of questions on team interactions and decisions.

This research offers support for the model posited by Engle and colleagues (2014), with specific applications to engineering teamwork. Students’ abilities to exert influence over interactions, communication, team thinking, and decision making is informed by their social position in the team. This research extends Engle and colleagues’ model by offering that diffuse (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender) and specific (e.g., perceptions of one’s and others’ prior engineering experience and expertise) status characteristics inform students’ socially negotiated influence, which are manifested in the nature and use of the questions they ask, and the impact of those questions on the interactional dynamics of the team.