Abstract:

An essential skill for engineers and technicians is team-working capabilities however few learning activities are commonly planned in High Education Programs. In order to trigger, enhance and assess team-working skills, a Problem Based Learning experience was planned, conducted and evaluated in the assignment of “Applied Statistics” belonging to a Forestry Engineering Degree Program.

The experience aim was to search which team-working descriptors (e.g., “communication”, “collaboration”, ”leadership”, …) were the main components in a composite team-working skill, and which were the relationships among descriptors. In addition, the comparison and the relationship between self-student’s and professor’s evaluation was another important issue to analyse.

For 10 weeks, students were clustered into 10 groups of 5 to 6 members chosen randomly to prevent friends might systematically joint themself, however the sex ratio within groups was controlled. Three different roles were assigned in each group: a leader, a secretary (co-leader), a controller, and the rest of the members.

A statistical problem was proposed to each group (e.g., “A forest inventory at a date”, “A bird survey at date and place”, “A weather forecaster for a determined week”). Firstly, the students had to collect and process data, then they had to analyse and discuss results and, finally, made statistic predictions under risk or uncertainty about the targeted problem. The developed work had to be edited in a report structured as a scientific paper. In addition to the written document, each team had to make a 30 minute presentation where public questions were asked by the professor and some members of the other teams.

The experience was evaluated at scheduled times and by different evaluators:
1) a weekly team evaluation by each team controller (within groups),
2) a final presentation peer-evaluation by the other teams,
3) a final presentation and document evaluation by the professor,
4) a final student self-evaluation, and
5) a final student peer-evaluation (within groups).

A common evaluation sheet form was used for all five marking processes, where scores were divided in descriptor blocks.

Data were analysed by different procedures:
1) A descriptive data analysis and a frequency analysis was carried out to find the team-working main descriptors,
2) A longitudinal data analysis was carried out with weekly data in order to obtain a pattern of the learning process,
3) Correlation analysis and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) were performed to reveal the relationships among descriptors.

As a main result, we obtained that students assigned more load to “collaborative” and “dedication” descriptors than to “leadership” and “innovation” descriptors. Longitudinal analysis found that the amount of the student’s learning hours was reciprocal to the spending teacher’s hours, and the number of female members in a group was a significant factor for improving marks.

Correlation analysis and PCA showed that, in student’s evaluations, descriptors associated to spent hours and applied effort presented the highest loads among other team-working descriptors. Conversely, the team-working skill evaluation made by the professor was strongly linked to the assignment contents and undervaluing the team-working skill descriptors.

Keywords:

Problem-based learning, team working skills, generic skills.