CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Huddled in groups, undergraduate students in Systems Engineering 101, a foundational course taught by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign industrial and enterprise systems engineering professor Molly Hathaway Goldstein, deconstruct and reverse-engineer a product of their choice, such as a desktop gumball machine or a model of a Stirling engine.
These experiential, hands-on group projects aim to build the collaborative skills that these future engineers will encounter in the workplace and that accreditation organizations indicate are crucial components of engineering curricula.
“Engineering practice is collaborative and team based,” said Goldstein, who also is the director of the Product Design Lab in The Grainger College of Engineering. “The call in accreditation is to better prepare students to enter that environment. And most engineering faculty are trained in their technical components but don’t necessarily understand how to bring collaborative learning to their classrooms in impactful and efficient ways.”
“There’s a lot of content in these courses. So faculty think, ‘I don’t have time to do a group activity or team bonding,’ ” said Emma Mercier, a professor of curriculum and instruction and the first author of a paper about collaborative learning in engineering education, recently published as a chapter in the “International Handbook of Engineering Education Research.”
Goldstein; Preethi Baligar, a professor in the Centre for Engineering Research Education at KLE Technological University, India; and U. of I. graduate student Robin Jephthah Rajarathinam were co-authors.
According to a survey conducted by American Colleges and Universities that was cited in the paper, “63% of the 400 employers surveyed felt graduates were not prepared to work in teams effectively and were ill-prepared to use technologies to solve a problem.”
But simply placing students in groups does not necessarily help them develop the skills employers are seeking in graduates, the team wrote.
About two years ago, Goldstein and Mercier teamed up to investigate and nurture these collaborative learning experiences for students in Goldstein’s course.
“I’ve been working with computer science for the past couple of years, and one of the things that comes out largely is that a student who wants to get an ‘A’ is different from a student who’s just taking the course because it’s required,” Mercier said. “It’s hard for faculty to realize that every class is not a priority for every student.”
She said there are many simple team-building activities instructors can have student groups engage in, such as spending five to ten minutes choosing a name for their group or discussing their goals for the course, that help them understand other team members’ perspectives. “What are their priorities? What things bug them about other people? Recognizing those emotional pieces are really important in a semester-long group project.”
Teams – along with tasks, tools and teachers – are core components of creating learning experiences that promote the collaborative skills students need for educational and career success, Mercier said.
In successful teams, members engage with each other, view problems from others’ perspectives, listen and persist equally with the task. Accordingly, two of students’ common complaints about group projects are about “free riders” – team members who do not complete their fair share of the work – and “social loafers,” those who reduce the amount of effort they put into group projects compared with assignments they complete on their own.
Students also complain about team members who dominate the group, making unilateral decisions, assigning work to other members or completing tasks alone, according to the researchers.
The tools component includes identifying aids that group members use to communicate with each other, take notes, share files and use for their design work, Goldstein said.
“And as for the teachers’ component, in these large engineering classes it is not just a teacher but sometimes an entire team of graduate teaching assistants or undergraduate learning assistants leading these activities,” Goldstein said. “So we need to make sure that there are consistent training and goals, and that the whole teaching team knows how to deliver a consistent message.”
In designing the tasks for student teams, the researchers suggested that activities should neither be too easy or too difficult and should promote interaction, encouraging students to view problems from multiple perspectives and communicate their ideas.
However, these types of collaborative learning projects can be much more challenging for faculty members and TAs than lecture-based instruction, Mercier said.
“I have to be way more ‘on’ and attentive, going around and working with the groups. Students bring up a topic, so now we’ve got to cover it. It takes more flexibility from teachers. And TAs aren’t necessarily prepared for that. These group projects are much more open-ended than that so it takes more pliability,” she said.
Mercier and Luc Paquette, a professor in the same department, were also the co-principal investigators on a $1.3 million National Science Foundation grant in which they investigated and designed tools to help teaching assistants implement collaborative learning.
“This is a new field for me, looking at collaborative learning,” said Goldstein, who received the 2023 Collins Award for Innovative Teaching. “And it’s complex. It’s a lot messier than looking at individuals, and I think that’s one of the reasons that it’s so exciting. And we do know that it continues to be very impactful.”