ABSTRACT
The Engineering discipline continues to be challenged by recruitment and retention. As early as elementary school, children show little interest in engineering and appear to have limited confidence in their own ability to be successful in the discipline . In response to this ongoing national problem, we present a project that makes use of inelusive practices to increase students' performance and team work in a highly diverse summer research program in cognitive communications. The program helped students work productively on diverse teams and understand their own conflict styles to ensure they contributed to team productivity. The results of the statistical analyses revealed a diverse profile of conflict styles . In addition, students ' college academic self-efficacy increased from pre-test to post-test.
