Towards Changing Attitudes and Developing Teamwork Skills in a Computer Science Course

Teamwork skills are some of the most sought after by recruiters in the IT industry, because effective teams can leverage the strengths and knowledge of each individual, to be more productive and efficient. Therefore, developing such skills in Computer Science (CS) degree graduates should be seen as essential for their future employability. One way of doing so is by introducing teamwork in assessment. However, many HE courses avoid doing this, due to: issues with assessment fairness and meeting learning objectives if some team members do not pull their weight, the time and resources needed to resolve team conflicts, difficulties to decide team composition. There is also the issue of student attitude: team effectiveness may not be as high on students’ agenda as achieving high marks, and so some students may be against teamwork, even if it could help them in the future.
In the School of Informatics's Inf2-Software Engineering and Professional Practice second year course, effort has been put into leveraging these issues by developing a new approach to teamwork. In the assessment consisting of a 3-part software development team project:
• Teams of 3-4 students are randomly assigned, which is realistic compared with the industry;
• A written guide outlining some approaches and tools for teamwork and encouraging further study is provided in week 2;
• Students are actively encouraged to work on developing their team effectiveness;
• Team member absence and team conflicts are expected to be resolved by the team, and only after a demonstration of effort will the Course Organiser (CO) intervene;
• Each of the parts of the assessment requires the team to:
o reflect on their teamwork efforts, any approaches and tools used for teamwork (marked), using an adaptation of Bassot’s Integrated Reflective Cycle (2013);
o declare each member’s percentage of contribution to the work of the team, signed by all team members; Marks are adjusted according to this declaration and any conflict is discussed with the CO.
This approach is being formally evaluated in terms of the students’ 1) team effectiveness and 2) attitudes towards teamwork, and how they evolve during the course. To this end, online questionnaires are used with students in labs and via email shortly after they have been assigned to a team, and after each piece of assessment.
This presentation will detail the teamwork approach and its evaluation results, and open a discussion about applicability in other courses.