Using Reflection to Promote Teamwork Understanding in Engineering Design Education

“Using Reflection to Promote Teamwork Understanding in Engineering Design Education” Penny L. Hirsch and Ann F. McKenna

Background The study context was a two-quarter, project-centered, team-based introduction to user-centered design—Engineering Design and Communication (EDC)--that is co-taught by faculty from engineering and communication and thus integrates communication and teamwork instruction into the design experience[1]. Teamwork instruction and coaching were part of the original course design, since faculty assumed that team experience alone is insufficient to help students acquire the teamwork competency needed to succeed in engineering. Following Schon’s and Kolb’s ideas about reflective practice and experiential learning [2, 3], students had several opportunities in the course to reflect on their team’s achievements and performance [4]. Thus their concrete design experiences were combined with reflection and abstraction so that their ideas could evolve as they underwent a holistic adaptive learning process.

Method After taking steps to improve teamwork instruction in the following year, we planned a more structured assessment to explore student learning. Just before the course and at the end of their first quarter, students were given a reflective assessment to complete online: “Identify and discuss the factors that contribute to successful team performance.” In answering the question for the second time, students were able to see their original answer. Thus, they could see that the response was designed as an ungraded reflective answer, not a test. Approximately 96% of students completed the pre assignment and approximately 79% completed the post. For analysis, we randomly selected 75 paired responses (approximately 25% of the data). Two readers blind-coded the responses, looking for the same essential characteristics of successful teams that we used in the earlier study and that are widely identified in the literature.

Findings In the ten categories that were tracked, positive changes occurred in seven areas, where the post score was higher than the pre score. We used these scores not as a measure of “right” and “wrong” ideas about teamwork but rather as guides to analyze student responses in specific areas. From this examination, we concluded the following:

Conclusion Opportunities for reflection on teamwork appear to have a useful place in design courses in the engineering curriculum. However, further work needs to be done to explore the relationship between this growth in teamwork and the students’ performance in design.

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