A STUDY OF THE IMPACT OF TEAM FUNCTIONS IN A FIRST YEAR DESIGN COURSE ON STUDENT PERFORMANCE IN LATER DESIGN COURSES

In this paper, the authors report on a longitudinal study of the impact of the function that a student assumes in this introductory course on his/her performance in design courses taken later in their engineering studies. The study tracks the performance of 204 students through the curriculum up to and including the final year's capstone design project. Tracking is accomplished using repeated measures ANOVA (RMANOVA). Potential correlations are statistically examined between the introductory course grades and sub-grades of the major deliverables (report and contest) and those from the later design courses after being segregated according to team function. The findings reveal strong impact of team functions on performance in design courses taken by the students up to three years later in the curriculum. Furthermore, it was also found that 64% of all teams formed for the capstone project contained two or more of the team original members formed in ME Tools.