Using consultation in student groups to improve development of team work skills amongst more reluctant students.

Aalborg University has used Problem Based Learning since 1974. Each semester the students make one project in student groups (15 ECTS) supervised by one or two supervisors. The other 15 ECTS of the semester is split into three courses where exercises often are solved together in the students groups to enhance peer learning.

From the practice in Aalborg it is know that as freshmen students working in groups often find it difficult to collaborate and to use their full learning potential from being a team.
It seems obvious that teambuilding and help to develop team work competences could be very useful for the new teams. This was documented by Professor Kolmos in 1999 [1]. To improve the potential of project work a special course is offered to help the students develop their skills in cooperation, learning and project management (CLP).

This course has proven very helpful for most of the engineering students but students from some educations are more reluctant to follow the course and do the exercises than other. Students studying Bachelor in IT (BAIT) has for two years showed less interest in the course than e.g. Software and Computer Science students. The consequences of this are that some BAIT students don’t develop their team work skills and competences to the level that is expected. This has been identified by comparing process analysis that each student group has to write after the first semester to reflect on their skills in team work and come up with ideas to improve their performance in the next project.

Each lesson in the CLP course is approximately 50% lecturing and 50% exercises. It was decided to try and activate the students more in the autumn 2014 and to follow up on some of the key exercises. The implementation involved student groups handling in written answers to exercises from two key lessons on group contract and time planning. Then the lecturer visited each group 2 weeks later to discuss the exercises and the lessons learnt by applying the methods in the daily project work.

The effect of the changes in the course is analyzed by comparing both the written Process Analysis and individual answers from the students to relevant exam questions taken from a written exam of the course. The results show significantly improvements in the quality of the Process Analysis and the development of the student’s team work competencies. Only 3% failed the course exam compared to 19% the year before.

References

[1] Kolmos Anette, 1999, Progression of collaborative skills, Themes and variations in PBL, Vol. 1, ISBN 0 7259 1068 2.