Teamwork & Group Work
Teamwork and group work are increasingly common elements of engineering learning. When group activities and projects are assigned, there are two types of learning outcomes:
- outcomes related to the content of the course (product outcomes) and
- outcomes related to team skills and participation (process outcomes).
Fostering learning in the content area is comfortable for engineering faculty, but fostering learning in the team skills area can be unfamiliar. It is important to explicitly teach team skills and to design assignments that support team skills. Below are ideas that may be useful for creating assessable teamwork assignments that foster the learning of teamwork.
Principles for Teaching and Assessing Teamwork
- Tips for collaborative assignments and implementation stories in engineering
- Teamwork in the classroom, including
- The difference between group work and teamwork
- Stages of team growth
- Teaching group work
- Group work and study teams
- Strategies for accounting for individual effort
Making Scoring/Grading Useful for Assessment
- General principles for making scoring/grading useful for assessment (rubrics)
- Scoring the team's product
- Score the team product using the same attributes as for an individual product
- Scoring the teamwork process
- Attributes (characteristics) of effective teams that could be used to construct a rubric (scroll down)
- A Study Comparing Reliability for Peer Rating Instruments (page 6 of pdf)
- Example rubrics for team process
- For an outside observer scoring team process and participation
- For each team member scoring team process and participation
- For an outside observer or team members scoring group functioning (page 2 of pdf)
- For each team member describing group effectiveness
- Example rubrics for individual contributions and participation
- For individual teamwork skills
- For individual team skills (page 18 of pdf)
