| Abstrakt: |
The ability to effectively work in teams is one of the desired outcomes of engineering and engineering technology programs. Unfortunately, working in teams is still challenging for many students. Social loafing, a tendency to work less when part of a team than when working individually, tends to destroy both teamwork performance and individual learning, especially in solving ill-structured problems, such as design. Furthermore, a bad experience on a past team is a significant concern as it could generate negative feelings about future team projects. The formation of collaborative teams is a critical first step in team-project-based design courses as team composition directly affects not only teamwork processes and outcomes, but also teamwork skills and experience. This NSF sponsored project aims to enhance students' teamwork experiences and teamwork learning through 1) understanding how to form better student design teams and 2) identifying exercises that will effectively improve team member collaboration. We do this by comparing student team characteristics and design task characteristics with the quality of the design team outcome and examining the resulting correlations. Student characteristics cover six categories: 1) background information, 2) work structure preferences, 3) personality, 4) ability, 5) motivation, and 6) attitude. Task characteristics and design team outcomes are characterized using the Creative Product Semantic Scale (CPSS) and the Design Quality Rubric (DQR). In this article, we present correlations between a subset of student team characteristics and task characteristics with design team outcomes for 2020-2021 senior design teams at Northern Illinois University and the Rochester Institute of Technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
