Cognition as a measure of team diversity

Project-based learning in teams has been increasingly prevalent in engineering and design education, as it affords unique collaborative learning opportunities. Though many believe that diversity on a team allows for the richest learning experiences and perhaps the most innovative outcomes, this has been difficult to show experimentally, particularly when diversity is measured according to standard ethnographic factors (such as race, gender, etc.). We propose that a more meaningful measure of team diversity may be “cognitive diversity,” or the breadth of problem solving styles that is inherent to the team. These problem solving styles are determined by measuring the cognitive preferences of individual students with psychometric survey instruments. In this paper, we describe a method by which this individual psychometric data can be reconstructed as a measure of team cognitive diversity, and present our findings as applied to an international graduate-level engineering design course. Our findings include the positive result that there is substantial cognitive diversity even in populations with relatively little ethnographic diversity (e.g. a class of incoming Masters students with largely similar age, work experience and socioeconomic background). Furthermore, there is evidence that these cognitive characteristics can be linked to long-term team dynamics and performance. Understanding how cognition affects learning and collaboration will help us to craft more informed team learning experiences and to form better, more innovative design engineering teams in academia and industry.