Abstract:

While the primary goal of a tertiary education institute is to produce graduates who are competitive in job market, it is reported that many university leavers are lacking essential qualities, such as teamwork and problem-solving when they start their career. One of the major challenges educators face is to assess these skills objectively, fairly, and efficiently. The goal of this study is to develop an IT system for monitoring and assessing individual teamwork skill and problem solving skill. The system provides a flexibility for educators to customize a teamwork process that consists of different combinations of individual work and team work in various sequences. Data dependent of data independent problem statements can be assigned to individuals and teams on homogeneous or heterogeneous basis to stretch students’ understanding of a business problem and thus enhance their problem solving skills. A trial run in a business module shows a convincing effectiveness of the approach in both subjective student feedback and objective test result comparison.

Keywords:

Teamwork, problem solving, system, assessment.