(188e) A Diversity Index to Assess College Engineering Team Performance and Tracking Insitutional Changes on Diversity

We have developed a Diversity Index (DI) to better quantify the impact of eight traditionally underrepresented demographic categories in chemical engineering (“Women,” “Non-Binary,” “Black or African American,” “Hispanic or Latino/a,” “Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, Middle Eastern, or Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander (Asian/other for a short version),” “LGBQT+,” “Disabilities,” and “First Generation”). The complexities of conceptualizing and measuring diversity have been thoroughly examined in the literature. The dominant methods to estimate diversity have been reviewed. The proposed Diversity Index offers advantages in terms of the simplicity of calculations, while providing a comprehensive structure to analyze the contributions of underrepresented groups. This Diversity Index can then be used to track institutional changes in the inclusion of diversity at any level (college, school, and department). Moreover, the index is particularly valuable to address the configuration of small teams (i.e., 4-6 members) in engineering courses, providing a quantitative tool for faculty to assess the impact of diversity on teamwork performance.

The Diversity Index has been developed and tested throughout the last four years (191-2022) with nine chemical engineering Pillar courses (Process Reactive Engineering, Process Control, and Process Design). The evaluation includes 410 students, grouped in 76 self-selected teams, performing over 45 technical projects, and 108 outreach projects. Results confirm the bias towards more uniformity when teams are left to the self-selection of members. However, this index provides quantitative assessment on the spread of diversity in those groups, that faculty can use to establish constraints or reward diversity in teams. Moreover, results show a promising method to correlate diversity and team performance. In addition, this index is open to add other categories that could prove increasing potential for correlation with team performance, and includes a tuning parameter to be adjusted by research to adapt to various societal contexts. In this regard, this index opens many opportunities for specific research on tracking institutional changes on diversity, admission and retention of underrepresented groups, and team performance in assignments and projects.

Diversity is currently sought as a necessary component of engineering education, required for the future workforce, faced with dramatic demographic changes across the world. However, diversity continues to be a much debated and often confusing term, where the relation between team diversity and performance has not shown conclusive results, and very often, contradictory trends. The proposed Diversity Index can be developed into a valuable tool to assess quantitatively and qualitatively all these significant issues in engineering education.