(345d) Engineering Teamwork in Cheme Car: Methods Development

Teamwork is widely recognized as an important skill for engineers in the professional workplace due to the ability for high-performing teams to accomplish more than the sum of their members. The development of teamwork skills in undergraduate engineering programs is included by ABET in their accreditation criteria.¹ Furthermore, recent alumni report that teamwork is among the most important skills in their professional lives.² Within engineering education, active learning strategies are being promoted, but the norm in undergraduate engineering classrooms is the passive lecture format. Engineering students are usually evaluated individually and assigned a grade on a curve, in which there is a scarcity of high grades, resulting in student-student competition.³ This class format runs counter to the development of teamwork skills, leaving a gap in preparation for graduates who enter the workforce in which teams are the standard way to work.⁴

Another way for undergraduate students to gain experience working in teams to solve engineering problems is in undergraduate technical clubs, such as ChemE Car. The ChemE Car competition, run by AIChE, involves university teams building a shoebox-sized model car that is powered and controlled by chemical reactions. One of the objectives of the competition is to provide students with the opportunity to partake in a team-oriented design project.⁵ The present research study attempts to assess the development of teamwork skills among members of the ChemE Car team at a large public research institute.

This study is set within the context of professional skill development. We therefore used the Katzenbach and Smith teamwork framework as a basis to observe how the ChemE Car teams work. The fit is based on the professional context of the Katzenbach and Smith model, as opposed to alternate frameworks that are situated within a classroom context with associated instruction and assignments. The features of a team, according to Katzenbach and Smith, are

● A small number of members with complementary skills committed to a common purpose

● Collective work products that multiple team members work on together

● Team members are necessarily working with each other on the same collective work product

● A specific team purpose, which is typically assigned by someone outside the group

● Performance measured by assessing collective work products⁶

This framework is useful for evaluating ChemE Car project teams, because each team is comprised of five to eight people working to improve a power source or control mechanism for the model car, and all the members are working together to produce calibration curves that can be used to control the car at the competition. The task is specified by the conditions of the competition as determined by AIChE, and teams’ work products are evaluated by their placement in the competition.

The model provided by Katzenbach and Smith was evolved into a conceptual framework that could be used to evaluate team interactions by Davis and Ulseth (2013),⁷ examining four areas of performance: team relationships, production of joint-work products, individual work products, and knowledge assets. This theoretical framework was used to develop the data collection methods to be used in the present study.

The first data collection method we developed is an observation rubric adapted to the specific context of observing a ChemE Car project team working in the laboratory. Observation was chosen as a method because it allows for minimal researcher interference in a self-directed environment, and the researcher can easily collect data on how students interact.⁸ The rubric is used to classify the specific actions of teams in the lab as either successful team interactions that promote good teamwork or unsuccessful team interactions that hold the team back. The rubric underwent a validation process, in which it was assessed for relevance to the research question by observing the laboratory sessions of several project teams and coding interactions observed as either within the scope of the rubric or not. It was determined through this validation that team relationships and production of joint-work products could be evaluated through observation, but individual work products and knowledge assets could not be assessed as well.

It was therefore decided that performing interviews with project team members about individual work products and knowledge assets would yield complementary information. Interviews also allow for the researcher to gain insight into subjects’ internal thoughts and feelings, which complements observational data related to team relationships.⁸ The interview questions were validated by asking ChemE Car members graduating in spring 2020 about the perceived scope and clarity of the questions to ensure the intent of the question is effectively communicated.

The results of this research will be used to write a guide for project managers of ChemE Car teams, with suggestions on how to optimize laboratory time to cultivate the development of teamwork skills among the general members of ChemE Car. In addition, the process of this research will be recorded to provide a process future students can use to investigate the effectiveness of and improve the project managers’ guide.

Literature Cited

1. Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology. (2015). Criteria for Accrediting Engineering Programs. Retrieved from https://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/criteria-for-a... ng-programs-2016-2017/

2. Passow, H. J. Which ABET Competencies Do Engineering Graduates Find Most Important in Their Work? Journal of Engineering Education 2012 , 101 (1), 95–118.

3. Smith, K. A. Cooperative Learning: Making “Groupwork” Work. New Directions for Teaching and Learning 1996 , 1996 (67), 71–82.

4. Smith, K. A. Teamwork and Project Management , 4th ed.; McGraw-Hill Education: New York, 2014.

5. American Institute of Chemical Engineers. (2020). 2020 Regional Competition Official Rules . Retrieved from https://www.aiche.org/sites/default/files/media/document/chem-e-car_offi... 0_final.pdf

6. Katzenbach, J. R.; Smith, D. K. Harvard Business Review . 1993.

7. Davis, D.C. & Ulseth, R.R.. (2013). Building student capacity for high performance teamwork. ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings. 8. Mccord, R. E.; Matusovich, H. M. Naturalistic Observations of Metacognition in Engineering: Using Observational Methods to Study Metacognitive Engagement in Engineering. Journal of Engineering Education 2019 , 108 (4), 481–502.