This learning initiative will spearhead student teamwork skills development across three disciplines: business, engineering, and psychology. The initiative will provide customized feedback and structured facilitated debriefs to a large number of students in introductory or early career-stage courses in business, engineering, and psychology over three years. The project will leverage  itpmetrics.com software assessment platform, developed by Thomas O'Neill, that is free-of-charge for any instructor and assesses team dynamics and peer effectiveness in teams, personality as it relates to team behaviour, and conflict management styles. Over the course of the grant, the team is committed to augmenting the teamwork experience of 1400 students involved in these classes each year.

Melissa Boyce

Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts

Melissa completed her PhD in forensic psychology at the University of Victoria. She is a senior instructor in the Department of Psychology where she teaches Research Methods, Statistics, Social Psychology, Psychology and the Law, and Consumer Psychology. She is a two-time recipient of a Student Union Teaching Excellence Award and of the Faculty of Arts Established Teacher Award.

Contact
Melissa Boyce
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts
mboyce@ucalgary.ca

Employers consistently rate teamwork skills as an essential competency for career readiness (NACE, 2018). This recognition has led many instructors to include collaboration in their courses and departments to include teamwork skills in their program learning outcomes. Collaborative learning has been linked to many psychological and academic benefits including increased academic self-esteem (Modaber & Bayan Far, 2017), engagement (Blasco-Arcas, Buil, Hernández-Ortega, & Sese, 2013), learning (Cortwright et al., 2003;  Hagen, 2000), and achievement (Huitt, Killins, & Brooks, 2015; Steinbrink & Jones, 1993), but can also be a source of frustration. Two common sources of conflict in teamwork are social loafing (Kerr & Bruun, 1983; Simms & Nichols, 2014) and unequal distribution of labour (Salomon & Globerson, 1985; Robins, 1995). We employed an ABA design to examine the effectiveness of student accountability as a possible mechanism to maximize gains of teamwork while minimizing sources of team conflict.

In Years 1 and 3 (Control), teams of 4-6 students completed a project and provided anonymous quantitative and qualitative peer evaluations of their team members through itpmetrics.com after the project was completed. Although the evaluations were shared with team members, they were used for formative purposes only. In Year 2 (Intervention), students completed the same team project and peer evaluations, but were informed at the beginning of the course that a portion of their project grade would be based on the quantitative scores they received from their team members. We found that incorporating peer feedback into students’ final grades on team projects improved team dynamics, satisfaction, and potency, in addition to individual contributions to the team effort as assessed by peers. Based on these findings we conclude that peer feedback can significantly improve individual effort and team productivity as long as it is tied to summative assessment. In addition to the clear benefits for students, these findings may be especially appealing for instructors of large classes as a peer evaluation tool such as itpmetrics.com is easy to implement and promotes student self-governance of task division and labour.

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