Keeping an Eye on the Team: Developing an Observational Tool for Student Teams

Teamwork is an essential component of the engineering design process. Engineers in today’s globalized economy must be able to work in multidisciplinary teams. As such, graduates of engineering programs must be able to apply their technical knowledge in team-based environments where flexibility, communication, and cooperation are needed to solve problems that do not necessarily have well-defined technical boundaries. The current study is part of an ongoing project addressing teamwork skills at the Petroleum Institute (PI), an engineering university in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Although a variety of soft skills, such as teamwork, communication, and project management are incorporated into the current curriculum at the PI, teamwork can be a particularly challenging soft skill to acquire and to teach. The quality of team experiences is dependent on team members’ perceptions of their group dynamics and the contributions that individuals make to the team. As students at the PI are segregated by gender (a common practice in government universities within the Gulf Arab region), the socio-cultural context provides a unique environment for the study of team dynamics. A number of tools are being used to investigate teamwork at the PI, including peer evaluations, student interviews, surveys, and teacher observations. However, in order to ascertain whether student teams are actually functioning in an effective manner (as compared to students’ perceptions of this phenomenon), it is important to specify the teamwork behaviors that are expected of effective teams. This is particularly relevant for student teams as the one of the goals should be to provide specific and measurable feedback to help students improve their performance. The present study provides insight into the development of an observational tool for identifying team behaviors among students at the PI. Although the project revolves around engineering students, the observation tool can be used to evaluate teamwork behaviors in any discipline. The tool adapts the competencies and behaviors of a computer-based peer feedback system known as Team Developer. The presentation will discuss the process involved in the development of the observational tool, its alignment to industry benchmarks, as well as the development of protocols and options for administering the behavioral instrument. The advantages and challenges of incorporating a behavioral assessment for teamwork will also be discussed.