期刊名称：Proceedings of the Canadian Engineering Education Association
出版年度：2015
出版社：The Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA)
摘要：The influence of team function on design project outcomes was examined in this study. Team function was considered across six key dimensions, including unity, communication, distribution of responsibility, problem solving, conflict management, and team self-evaluation. Three different methods were used to quantify team function: a survey in which students selfrated their team’s function, a comparison of performance on quizzes first performed individually and then as a team (as a measure of the degree of communication, problem solving, and unity), and an analysis of the differentiation in inter-team peer evaluation scores (as a measure of distribution of responsibility, conflict management, and unity). Design project outcomes were measured as a composite of grades from competition prototypes, written reports, oral and poster presentations, and several other deliverables. These scores were normalized to remove year-to-year variability. Statistically significant relationships between each measure of team function and design project outcomes were observed. For each dimension of team function, teams with high average self-rating on the survey also had 4% to 6% higher normalized design project scores compared to those with low self-ratings. On the quizzes, teams that were more likely to answer a question incorrectly when one or more members knew the correct answer (suggesting a lack of communication, unequal input to problem solving, or reduced team unity) also received lower normalized design project scores by as much as 4%. The full relationship between this metric and project outcome was more complicated though, as the teams least likely to answer incorrectly when some members had the correct answer performed below average on the projects. Lastly, a trend of decreasing composite project score was correlated with increasing inter-team differences in peer evaluation scores (suggesting unequal distribution of responsibility, increased conflict, or reduced team unity). Interestingly, teams that did not differentiate peer evaluation scores at all (i.e. each team member received the same peer evaluation score ‘no matter what’) had project scores 7% lower on average than teams with a small non-zero differentiation in peer evaluation scores. Taken together, the results of this study support the hypothesis that team function plays an important role in project outcomes, contributing better than half a letter grade difference.
