(459b) Integrating Communication Skills and Fostering Collaboration in the Mass and Energy Balances Course with Team Activities

This year we changed our course to implement a collaborative learning environment as opposed to a competitive model. An important part of this change was to integrate communication and teamwork skills throughout the semester to facilitate collaborative learning in group projects and activities. We designed the course to progressively increase communication skill level from initially writing simple memos to writing formal project reports, from small team presentation activities in recitations to giving a final oral presentation on a team project. Communication and teamwork tasks were embedded within many different assignments including homework problems, recitation activities, lecture ?think-pair-share? activities, and three multi-week team projects. We chose the team project topics to 1) explore a breadth of topics within chemical engineering (environment, human health, and energy) to engage the interests of students from information that we collected in a beginning of the semester survey, 2) connect the projects to societal impact, as many students said on the survey that this was an important motivating factor for exploring chemical engineering as a career choice, 3) provide students with a sense of the size scales over which chemical engineers solve problems, and 4) provide a forum in which students could learn important communication and collaboration skills in teams as a foundation for the rest of their career. We carefully selected groups based on a variety of data to create groups that facilitated collaboration. We were sensitive to selecting groups to positively integrate women and underrepresented groups and foster team work to promote communication and critical thinking skills of all students through collaboration. Student feedback on this approach and statistics will be provided.