This engineering education research project investigates faculty beliefs about communication and teamwork, and compares these beliefs to students' beliefs. The research focuses on first elucidating what faculty and students believe about communication and teamwork, then investigating the alignment of faculty and students beliefs, and finally studying interventions that transform faculty beliefs. The study will look at these beliefs in three engineering fields (civil, mechanical, and industrial) in order to maximize the impact on student learning. The research will occur at five partner schools, making research results more transferable.
The project can have broad impact on how teamwork and communication are taught since it bridges research on epistemology (the theory of what is knowledge and knowing) to practice. A very important outcome of this project, if successful, is changing how faculty teach and students learn the key professional skills of teamwork and communication. The project has targeted research sites to represent diverse populations of students to help ensure that the results can be used across a broad spectrum of universities.
Communication and teamwork skills remain top-priority outcomes for engineering graduates: they are identified by ABET as key student learning outcomes for accreditation; in national reports they are included in the characteristics desired of future engineers; and they remain high on employers’ requirement lists. The recent emphasis on integrating professional practice across the curriculum has further increased both the need and the opportunity to insure that students develop these core skills. Yet even as the number of team projects and communication assignments in engineering courses grows, researchers and educators alike know comparatively little about the epistemologies of engineering faculty within this learning system, or about how faculty epistemologies affect the learning mechanisms of engineering students. Without such knowledge, the engineering education community remains hampered in its ability to enhance learning these core professional skills. Our project addressed this gap by examining faculty and student beliefs, separately and then comparatively, with regard to how teamwork and communication are taught and learned. Specifically, we focused on the following research questions: RQ1. What are faculty beliefs regarding both effective practice and transferable learning outcomes with respect to communication and teamwork? What, if any, gaps exist between faculty’s explicit and implicit beliefs? Between their beliefs and current research in these areas? RQ2. What are students’ beliefs regarding their practice and learning in these areas? How do students’ beliefs align with faculty beliefs and with desired outcomes? RQ3. What interventions can help faculty better align both their beliefs and their teaching practices with robust, research-based learning outcomes for communication and teamwork? How do these interventions affect the teaching and learning of these skills in engineering? As these questions suggest, the overarching goals of this study were to: 1) first understand what faculty and students believe, and hence what they teach and learn, respectively, about communication and teamwork; 2) to articulate how well faculty and students beliefs are aligned; and finally 3) to enhance teaching by studying interventions that provide educators with both necessary knowledge and viable strategies for enacting that knowledge in the classroom. To accomplish these outcomes, we enlisted four partner schools representing variety in institution type, size, and location. We incorporated a total of 53 interviews with faculty, 12 focus groups with students and surveys with students (300 responses total) to generate outcomes that are both rich in description and grounded in statistical measures. We used motivation theories broadly to ground our study. Along with our findings we have identified important future research avenues with regard to research and teaching practice: Critical motivation factors contribute to faculty choices to teach teamwork and/or communication. High competence (ability) and high autonomy (sense of freedom in what/how they teach) were associated with faculty who choose to teach teamwork and/or communication. Although the cost value (time and effort expended) is often cited in literature as a deterring factor, in our study people who mentioned cost still often taught teamwork and/or communication skills. This leads us to believe that developing faculty ability and agency with regard to teaching these skills could contribute to greater engagement in teaching teamwork and communication skills. Faculty struggled to articulate how to teach teamwork and many actually said that it could not be taught and that it is just something one must learn by doing. In order to encourage faculty to teach teamwork, we believe an intervention would have to first overcome the belief that it cannot be taught. This would have to be addressed as part of developing ability and agency. When asked about ability to teach teamwork and/or communication, faculty often reported their ability to DO these things rather than TEACH them. Further research is needed to separate these two beliefs. Separate entities or other university departments (i.e. technical writing centers) are often responsible for teaching engineering students technical communication despite potentially limited discipline specific knowledge and language trends (e.g. how mechanical engineers talk about designs and what is emphasized). Effective partnerships between engineering educators and technical writing centers could be a powerful solution. Through focus group interviews with and surveys of students we found a mis-match between the specific activities students believe are important and those at which they excel; students believed they were not good at some things which they also believe are important. The specific gaps between importance and ability varied by partner institution. Combined these findings highlight areas for continued study to examine the particular curricular contributions to ability and importance beliefs. This project represents a partnership between faculty from Purdue University and Virginia Tech. Through a no-cost extension, the work at Virginia Tech continues with a focus on developing and evaluating possible interventions to help faculty develop the ability and agency to teach teamwork and communication, particularly in core engineering courses. This research informed the book, Smith, K.A. (2013). Teamwork and Project Management, 4th Ed., McGraw-Hill
