Engineering students’ dynamic and fluid group practices in a collaborative design project

There is a growing interest in engineering education that the curriculum should include collaborative design projects. Collaboration and collaborative learning imply a shared activity, a shared purpose, a joint problem-solving space, and mutual interdependence to achieve intended learning outcomes. The focus, in this study, is on engineering students' collaborative group practices. The context is a design project in the fifth semester of the problem-based Architecture and Design programme at Aalborg University. Students' collaborative work in the preparation for an upcoming status seminar was video recorded in situ. In our earlier studies video ethnography, conversation analysis and embodied interaction analysis have been used to explore what interactional work the student teams did and what kind of resources they used to collaborate and complete the design task on a moment-moment basis. In this paper we report from a one-hour period where a group of four engineering students do final designs in preparation for the status seminar. Using recorded multi-perspective videos, we have analysed students' fine-grained patterns of social interaction within this group. We found that the interaction and collaboration was very dynamic and fluid. It was observed that students seamlessly switched from working individually to working collaboratively. In collaborative work students frequently changed constellations and would not only work as a whole group, but also would break into subgroups of two or three students to do some work. Our results point to the need to investigate group practices and individual and collaborative learning in design project groups and other collaborative learning environments in more detail and the results challenge a naïve individual-collaborative-binary.