“One for the Team: Goal Orientation and Gender-Correlated Task Division”

Assessments of student behavior in first- semester design experiences suggest that early team- based design projects can promote a team performance goal orientation that undermines students’ learning goals. In particular, we find that gender-correlated division of work can easily and unconsciously occur in these teams and that performance-oriented teams may be more likely to undermine womens’ learning goals then mens’ learning goals. We propose mechanisms to explain the effect and present results of promising interventions.