Performance Balanced Team Formation for Group Study and Design Projects

Abstract

Students should learn to work in teams in undergraduate engineering courses. In many cases students form their own teams for group study and design projects. This paper describes a performance-based team formation method implemented in two upper-division mechanical engineering thermal science courses. The instructor formed teams based on early academic performance in the class. Students with the highest exam scores were assigned as team leaders, and other students were distributed among the teams based on their exam scores in order to balance the talent among the teams. The team members were required to complete a design project together and were also encouraged to study together on homework assignments. As an incentive, the team members received bonus points. The team formation process was based on student performance has the advantages of being easy to implement and explain to reluctant students. A follow -up survey shows that the majority of students liked the performance balanced team formation method while some suggested broadening the performance metric and inclusion of peer evaluations to assess individual student grades in the team design project.

A Data Driven Tool to Support Design Team Composition Measuring Skills Diversity

“…The composition of teams of students in Project Based Learning is one of the first design tasks for the class and has a great impact on the learning experience of the students and in general on the overall course. In some cases, students can autonomously decide on their teammates (Karagozoglu, 2017), in others teachers can decide on team composition based on various factors, e.g., the academic performance of students (Karimi and Manteufel, 2020). Usually, the choice revolves around the idea of increasing diversity to boost team performance.…”

Challenges in Virtual Instruction and Student Assessment during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…He also assigns a research project in his graduate thermodynamics course. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the instructor assigned group projects [8]. After going online, simpler individual projects were assigned to maintain the social distancing requirements.…”

Students Poor Exam Performance in an Engineering Course after Twenty Months of Online Instruction and Efforts to Improve

“…A group project was assigned during the semester that was due near the end of semester. The procedure described in [18] was used to form the design teams. The team leaders were selected based on the students' performance in the first two exams.…”