An Exploratory Study of Teamwork Processes and Perceived Team Effectiveness in Engineering Capstone Design Teams

In their final year, engineering students in Canada work in teams on a design project. These projects require significant collaboration and, as such, the project's success is largely dependent on the students' teamwork. This work presents an exploratory study of capstone design teams in a large engineering school in Canada. The goal of the study was to draw valuable insights about the teamwork experiences, skills and gaps of students in capstone design teams. These insights will support evidence-based development and improvement of teamwork training for engineering students. The study was conducted in two phases. First, semi-structured interviews with 12 instructors of capstone design courses solicited their perspectives on students' capstone design teams. Findings from the instructor interviews and related literature were used to design a student survey. The survey was administered to more than six hundred fourth-year engineering students to further explore capstone design teams' dynamics. We collected information on students' team formation, distribution of tasks and roles in teams, project management methods used, and the different types of conflicts experienced. In addition, we investigated the potential links between those variables and team effectiveness and enjoyment. In general, our results provide strong evidence that having clear roles, a high degree of a match between students' interests and skills with their assigned tasks, similar expectations about the outcomes, a clear project management plan, and lower levels of conflicts in student teams are significantly correlated with perceived team effectiveness and enjoyment. We discuss the implications of our findings for targeted instructional interventions on required teamwork skills for students.