2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Teamwork is an essential professional proficiency that engineering students need to develop during their undergraduate educational program of study. An effective engineering undergraduate curriculum needs to provide ample opportunities to obtain functional teamwork skills, develop personal interaction proficiencies, and demonstrate essential levels cognitive development in preparation to successfully serve as contributing members of productive multidisciplinary teams, upon graduation. An ability for graduates to function on multidisciplinary teams is identified by ABET as one of eleven student outcomes in the a-k list that engineering programs need to adopt in preparing graduates to attain program educational objectives. Additionally, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Body of Knowledge (BOK) identifies nine professional outcomes, including teamwork, as a subset of 24 total outcomes that establish criteria for knowledge skills and attributes required by graduates to begin their careers in the practice of civil engineering. Criteria identified for teamwork require students to function effectively as a member of an intra-disciplinary team. This cognitive level of achievement satisfies the learning criteria threshold for Bloom’s Taxonomy 3, Application, as students would demonstrate an ability to apply learned concepts in familiar and unfamiliar situations.

This paper will describe teamwork activities occurring throughout the curriculum that map to assessment of the Department’s adopted teamwork outcome. An array of teamwork assignments and activities are provided throughout the civil engineering curriculum extending across all four years of the undergraduate coursework including: Introduction to Civil Engineering (CE 103) Surveying (CE 205), Geomatics (CE 208), Surveying Lab (CE 235/239), Highway Engineering (CE 302), Geotechnical Engineering Lab (CE 402), Introduction to Geotechnical Engineering (CE 409), Geotechnical Engineering II (CE 410), Environmental Engineering Lab (CE 419) and Capstone Design (CE 432/433). Teamwork assignments in these courses include: laboratory teams, problems solving sessions, homework assignments, class presentations, proposal preparation, design projects, and design project presentations. Course-based Embedded Indicator results, Department Senior Exit Survey data, assessment of student teamwork assignments, evaluation of student peer assessment, and student perception data of teamwork effectiveness will be evaluated and compared. Results from this paper will be useful in providing evidence on how well the curriculum is performing on this crucially profession skills outcomes and how well learning objectives are scaffold across the curriculum for optimal sequential learning of teamwork concepts and characteristics. Findings are indented to be of interest to other institutions that are working to adopt and refine effective educational methods and assessment criteria for support of teamwork outcomes.