Promoting Effective Student Teamwork Through Deliberate Instruction, Documentation, Accountability, and Assessment
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Biomedical Engineering Education ( 2020) https://doi.org/10.1007/s43683-020-00038-5
Teaching Tips - Special Issue (COVID)
Promoting Effective Student Teamwork Through Deliberate Instruction, Documentation, Accountability, and Assessment SARAH ILKHANIPOUR ROONEY
and REBECCA A. SCOTT
Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA (Received 20 June 2020; accepted 25 October 2020).
CHALLENGE STATEMENT Biomedical engineering (BME) undergraduate curricula often use design courses to provide students with experience working on teams. In our core BME Junior Design course, students function on teams of three to four in a semester-long project to engineer a solution to a client’s unmet need. Modeled after our Senior Design course and engineering industry, teams work through a four-phase design process: (1) defining the problem and design criteria, (2) concept generation and selection, (3) detailed design and prototyping, and (4) verification and validation. The deliverable of each phase is a written report, to which the students add subsequent phases and revise earlier phases based on feedback. The Junior Design process and report structure are identical to Senior Design. By the end of the semester, teams have a complete engineering design report that documents their entire process. The course has two faculty instructors, and in spring 2020, 50 students were enrolled. In addition, five undergraduate teaching assistants (TAs; 4 seniors, 1 sophomore, all BME) served as resident-experts on different prototyping techniques (computer-aided design (CAD), hand-tools, Arduino). The TAs supported the instructors and students by acting as liaisons, answering questions, providing feedback, and ensuring safety and organization in the design studio. Although our curriculum embeds many team projects, Junior Design is typically the students’ first experience centered around a single, major, teambased project; therefore, most of our students have not had significant training in how to work effectively on a Address correspondence to Sarah Ilkhanipour Rooney, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA. Electronic mail: [email protected]
team. The course is normally hands-on and studiobased; however, due to Covid-19, we transitioned to distance learning right after the students had completed concept selection and were about to begin prototyping. Just before the University announced its decision to move to online learning, we administered an anonymous survey to gauge students’ expectations for online learning and their prior Zoom experience. Teamwork was identified as one of the students’ primary concerns: 15/45 survey respondents listed collaboration and teamwork in response to ‘‘What concerns do you have about remote learning?’’ When our course transitioned mid-semester to a remotelearning format, we faced the challenge of how to foster teamwork in an online setting, particularly with learners who are novices in teamwork. Our philosophy is that deliberately training students in
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