Abstract:

Group work for third level Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) students, while increasing student understanding of content [1], also builds transferable skills [2]. At the centre of group work, is collaborative learning (CL). Laal and Laal [3] define CL as an “educational approach to teaching and learning that involves groups of learners working together to solve a problem, complete a task, or create a product”. CL requires members of a team to recognise, understand and respect each other’s strengths and contributions. In CL, team members must interact and use their abilities to accomplish the project goals. The assumption is that students know their own strengths and those of other members of their teams. However, it is rare that students know what strengths they bring to a team, as often they are unskilled at group work. Creating a high-performing team is more likely if team members are aware of their own strengths and those of other team members. A characteristic of high-performance teams is cohesiveness and crucially, member participation is associated with team cohesion, giving cohesive teams a sense of “we-ness”. Cohesive teams have many benefits such as heightened motivation, improved morale, better decision-making and better creativity [4].

We have developed a single-session positive psychology team-building exercise (PPTBE), to equip students with a toolkit to identify their character strengths and develop team cohesion, appreciation of team dynamics and team spirit and identified appropriate measurements to assess its effectiveness in a face-to-face student team setting. A key finding from this work is that awareness of character strengths makes for an effective team and enhances overall teamwork quality [5].

We now report on our efforts to pivot from face-to-face student teams to virtual teams. The change of learning environment results in a different learning experience, which requires us to rework our PPTBE. A particular challenge is that STEM students have a better attitude towards teamwork when working face-to-face than in virtual teams [6]. We adapt our PPTBE for use in an online environment for virtual student teams. We investigate the differences between face-to-face teams and virtual teams and identify the most appropriate measures to assess the PPTBE in this online context.

References:
[1] Chiriac (2014). Group work as an incentive for learning – students’ experiences of group work. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 558.
[2] Ruuskanen et al. (2018). An Exploratory Study of the Learning of Transferable Skills in a Research-Oriented Intensive Course in Atmospheric Sciences. Sustainability 10(5), 1385.
[3] Laal et al. (2021). Collaborative learning: what is it? Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 31, 491 – 495.
[4] Fung (2014). Relationships among Team Trust, Team Cohesion, Team Satisfaction, Team Effectiveness and Project Performance as Perceived by Project Managers in Malaysia. Australian Journal of Basic and Applied Sciences 8(8):205-216
[5] O’Sullivan et al (2019). ENHANCING TEAM WORK QUALITY USING POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND A SUPPORTING SMARTPHONE APPLICATION. EDULEARN19 Proceedings, pp. 6769-6776.
[6] Vance et al (2015). Teamwork efficacy and attitude differences between online and face-to-face students. In Proceedings of the IEEE Integrated STEM Education Conference, Princeton, NJ, USA, pp. 246–251.

Keywords:

Team-Building, Online Teams, Positive Psychology.