Case Study: Assisting students in understanding the expectations for group work
Keiko Yasukawa, Faculty of Engineering
As the first engineering subject students encounter, "Planning for Sustainability" provides an orientation to university study early in the students degree. With teamwork such an important part of engineering its teaching staff want the students to develop skills in working in teams from the start of the program. Each week the students work in groups in a mixture of tutorials and workshops where they are encouraged to combine with different group members from time to time.
The main group based assessment task in the subject is a poster in which students try to advocate the role of a particular technology in developing a more sustainable future. Though the presentation of the poster comes at the end of the subject, preparation for the group work takes place at the beginning of the semester. In the first activity students clarify the kind of environment they want to work in, what they want from their peers and what the teaching staff expect of group work.
This activity takes place in the first workshop in Week 1 following a short overview of the subject. Students form into groups of six to work through some guided questions related to the subject content. This provides them with their first experience of working in groups and at the end of that session they explore any problems they had with group processes. They do this by getting 3 or 4 different post-it note sheets and write down the expectations they have of their peers, what they want their tutors or teacher to do for them and anything they don't want to happen in the subject.
The students then attach the post-its on a sheet of cardboard and the subject lecturers read through the responses to get a sense of the issues of group work and their expectations of the subject from the students' perspective. All the students' comments are transcribes onto a sheet of paper and returned to them in the following teaching session. This provides another opportunity to discuss any of the issues raised by the students' comments.
If some group work process is not working later in the semester, the record of the student's expectations can be used to clarify expectations of effective group work. The group processes are not formally assessed, however there is an opportunity for the panel of staff members to ask questions about the group processes in the interview when the poster is assessed at the end of the semester.