An exploratory study of teamwork processes and perceived team effectiveness in engineering capstone design teams
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In their final year, engineering students in Canada work in teams on a design project. These projects require significantcollaboration and, as such, the project’s success is largely dependent on the students’ teamwork. This work presents an exploratorystudy of capstone design teams in a large engineering school in Canada. The goal of the study was to draw valuable insights aboutthe teamwork experiences, skills and gaps of students in capstone design teams. These insights will support evidence-baseddevelopment and improvement of teamwork training for engineering students. The study was conducted in two phases. First, semi-structured interviews with 12 instructors of capstone design courses solicited their perspectives on students’ capstone design teams.Findings from the instructor interviews and related literature were used to design a student survey. The survey was administered tomore than six hundred fourth-year engineering students to further explore capstone design teams’ dynamics. We collectedinformation on students’ team formation, distribution of tasks and roles in teams, project management methods used, and thedifferent types of conflicts experienced. In addition, we investigated the potential links between those variables and teameffectiveness and enjoyment. In general, our results provide strong evidence that having clear roles, a high degree of a matchbetween students’ interests and skills with their assigned tasks, similar expectations about the outcomes, a clear project management plan, and lower levels of conflicts in student teams are significantly correlated with perceived team effectiveness andenjoyment. We discuss the implications of our findings for targeted instructional interventions on required teamwork skills forstudents.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".