Abstract:

Nowdays, it is increasingly necessary not only the development of good technical skills, but also soft skills, which are not necessarily taught in classical engineering courses. Among these, the authors focused on the ability to work as a team, in laboratorial classes, in the chemical and biotechnology area, and to know how to relate to others and establish collaborative work which has been increasingly appreciated by employers. Therefore, in the present paper the authors intend to: make an analysis of the self and peer-assessments of students, as elements of a given laboratory group and to demonstrate some aspects of group dynamics; identify some of the causes of deviant results in the assessment, in order to establish the conditions to reduce them and, lastly, the software intends to develop the capacity of critical spirit and to work constructively in a team. In order to evaluate the interactions in the different groups of the curricular units of integrated laboratories of the Biotechnology Bachelor degree course, the authors resorted to an online tool designed to assist in the development of designed team skills and enhance the team experience - Sparkplus. This tool presents a quiz regarding teamworking skills to be answered by all team members regarding their own and their peer’s performance. Data was obtained from laboratory group teams of students from the second year of Biotechnology Bachelor at Escola Superior de Tecnologia do Barreiro, Polytechnique Institute of Setúbal for the course of laboratory IVB (in the academic year of 2016/2017) and laboratory IIIB (in the academic year of 2018/2019 ad 2019/2020).

Regarding the obtained results it was observed that students’ larger difficulties were related with the writing of the report for a given laboratory assignment, secondly it was leadership that lead to most discrepancies, and thirdly the Number crunching which concerns the mathematical calculations. These skills need to be developed in future work throughout the first course of laboratories in the first year. On the other side, students registered less difficulties in Efficient functioning of group, meaning that this skill was acquired by these students in the chemical and biological laboratories (IIIB or IVB) or previously. This skill in particular is especially developed in teams of students that had previously worked together.

With these results, the authors analysed the group dynamics, and inferred some of the causes of deviant results in the assessment. These findings induced actions to be taken in order to balance a given team, namely in terms of identification of the role of each member and to achieve the performance of a certain task efficiently and to work in a healthy environment.

Keywords:

Sparkplus, teamwork, skills, self and peer assessment.