Teamwork is increasingly promoted as a teaching-learning modality in engineering education at the tertiary level, due to its oftenbeing required in formal accreditation, ubiquity in professional engineering practice, and leveraging of successful cooperativelearning methods from primary and secondary education. Despite its promise, it frequently suffers from the problem of free riding,where group members do not carry out a fair share of work. Although virtually unreferenced in the engineering educationliterature, a large research base exists in the social and behavioral sciences for understanding the causes of free riding in collectiveaction settings. The purpose of this paper is to summarize some of the key results from this research, to provide an index into it forreaders who may wish to delve deeper into this literature, and to discuss concrete implications for structuring engineering educationresearch and practice related to teamwork. The summarized results include the importance of social norms, particularly of fairnessand reciprocity, norm enforcement and internalization, making explicit commitments, the repeated interactions required to developtrust, and the role that reputation plays for individuals within information-sharing networks.
© 2001-2024 Fundación Dialnet · Todos los derechos reservados