Assessment of engineering student team effectiveness
Abstract
The complexity and scale of modern engineering problems call for the cooperation and collaboration of a team of engineers with diversified skills and capabilities. Teamwork has been listed as one of the key professional skills that industry is seeking from newly graduated engineering students. Student teams have been widely used in modern engineering education practice. While a significant amount of research work has been done to assess engineering student teams, the lack of theoretical frameworks to conceptualize team effectiveness has impeded the development of systematic approaches to evaluating engineering student teaming experiences. Peer evaluations have been widely used as a way of assessing team effectiveness, however, there is a lack of a systematic way to calibrate the rating bias appeared in peer evaluations. This research built upon a three-factor team effectiveness model and provided a systematic teaming assessment procedure which can assess both individual members and a team as a whole. The participants in this thesis study were first-year engineering students from Fall 2007 to Spring 2012. The population size is about 1500 from each semester between these years. A vignette and peer evaluation instrument was developed and validated to assess the ability of engineering students to provide quality evaluations to their peers using a factorial design. A process to calculate students' rating ability score was developed and validated through a semidefinite vector transformation process. This thesis investigates the effect of providing students with formative team feedback on both their abilities to rate their peers as well as their abilities to function in a multidisciplinary team. Students who received feedback show significant improvement in their ability to rate their peers. Female students in general have less rating bias in peer evaluations as compared to male students. Peer evaluation as a systematical approach in identifying dysfunctional team is researched and validated through a triangulation process through measuring the correlations among a peer evaluation instrument, a team effectiveness instrument and a team stage instrument. All three methods show strong correlations. A proposal for expanding the current 3-factor model to a 4-factor model is also studied. With the research work from this thesis, engineering educators will be able to better understand team effectiveness and effective teaming behavior. Engineering educators will also be able to provide individual students with a rating ability score to measure their ability to rate their peers. Engineering educators and researchers can also use the instruments derived from this thesis to identify dysfunctional teams earlier in the semester.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Imbrie, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Educational evaluation|Science education|Higher education
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