An exploratory study of teamwork processes and perceived team effectiveness in engineering capstone design teams

• Autores: Mehrnaz Mostafapour, Ada Hurst
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 36, no. Extra 1 (Parte B), 2020 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Teamwork Assessment in Engineering Education), págs. 436-449
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In their final year, engineering students in Canada work in teams on a design project. These projects require significantcollaboration and, as such, the project’s success is largely dependent on the students’ teamwork. This work presents an exploratorystudy of capstone design teams in a large engineering school in Canada. The goal of the study was to draw valuable insights aboutthe teamwork experiences, skills and gaps of students in capstone design teams. These insights will support evidence-baseddevelopment and improvement of teamwork training for engineering students. The study was conducted in two phases. First, semi-structured interviews with 12 instructors of capstone design courses solicited their perspectives on students’ capstone design teams.Findings from the instructor interviews and related literature were used to design a student survey. The survey was administered tomore than six hundred fourth-year engineering students to further explore capstone design teams’ dynamics. We collectedinformation on students’ team formation, distribution of tasks and roles in teams, project management methods used, and thedifferent types of conflicts experienced. In addition, we investigated the potential links between those variables and teameffectiveness and enjoyment. In general, our results provide strong evidence that having clear roles, a high degree of a matchbetween students’ interests and skills with their assigned tasks, similar expectations about the outcomes, a clear project management plan, and lower levels of conflicts in student teams are significantly correlated with perceived team effectiveness andenjoyment. We discuss the implications of our findings for targeted instructional interventions on required teamwork skills forstudents.