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
Teamwork in the classroom, including
The difference between group work and teamwork
Stages of team growth
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 an outside observer or team members scoring group functioning (page 2 of pdf)
For individual team skills (page 18 of pdf)