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“This interaction between instructor and client is a critical first negotiation that sets the tone, expectations, and timing of the …project.” (p.583). “Once students are assigned a team, they need to learn quickly as much as they can about the organization and issue before their communication with their client.” (p.585) “In the student-client negotiation, students must learn when to listen and when to direct the conversation.” (p.586)
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“Clients in the real world will forget requirements, lack an understanding of technology and occasionally have difficult personalities. This can serve… as an excellent learning opportunity for students…In the real world, projects can be cancelled at any point due to a cut in funding. Even when the systems are being designed and built for free, the agency the students are working for can still find themselves short of funds…Generally speaking, it’s good to tell students that they’ll be graded on the system they produce, regardless of the client’s intention to implement it.” (p.24-25)
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“A team process known as the meetings-flow (MF) approach has recently been introduced in software capstone projects in engineering … programs at various institutions…The results revealed that MF significantly enhances a team’s communication and coordination and balances members’ contributions by giving mutual support and effort. It has relatively less influence, however, on student team cohesion.” (p.201)
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Approaches to evaluating individual students within the group include student distribution of grade points within a group (peer evaluation), … peer evaluation of project tasks and group maintenance tasks (peer evaluation), multiplying the group grade by an individual weighting (instructor/self peer/group evaluation), group grade plus/minus individual contribution grade (instructor/self/peer/group evaluation), shared group grade with instructor intervention where necessary (instructor evaluation).
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“Relational coordination was measured by the Relational Coordination survey; team climate by the Team Climate Inventory and questions …were asked about participation in multidisciplinary team meetings and disciplines represented in these meetings…The number of disciplines represented during multidisciplinary team meetings and team climate were positively related with relational coordination. The multilevel analysis showed a positive relationship between the number of disciplines represented during multidisciplinary team meetings and team climate with relational coordination.” (p.791)
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“Diversity in respect to the nationalities in the group was related to poorer performance…The results suggest that groups made up of students … of different nationalities tend to have lower grades compared to homogeneous groups. In contrast, having a group with a mix of GPAs can result in higher grades on the project.” (p.913)
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“Our experiences convinced us that the cooperative learning approach both enhanced our students’ understanding of these topics and … encouraged them to incorporate the associated skills into their working skill set. Including team exercises that dealt with various steps in the design process provided a “jump-start” on these unfamiliar activities in a structured, short duration exercise environment in class. Listening to presentations by other teams and reviewing and discussing another team’s results as a part of the team exercises provided an opportunity to see and think about different formulations of the problem they just considered.” (p.413)
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“Wikis were set up for teams of engineering students from different disciplinary backgrounds and years…Wikis were considered a potentially useful tool … to track engagement for Capstone design projects in engineering subjects.” (p.247) “Overall, the first cohort of students perceived the wiki to be a useful tool, with 62% of the cohort agreeing or strongly agreeing that it enhanced collaboration…This connection between activity and perceived usefulness implies either those who use a wiki regularly are more likely to perceive it as useful for collaboration, or that those who perceive it as useful are more likely to regularly contribute.” (p.258)
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“The struggle to coordinate group processes and tasks is a common challenge in collaborative problem-solving environments (Barron, 2000; Kim & … Hannafin, 2011)…Other tensions among students related to self-regulation, participation, and individual accountability in student dynamics.” (Project Leadership, para.1) “Scott (2014) delineates this dynamic in the team level characteristic she named Learning Team collaboration. This characteristic includes three elements: (1) sharing responsibility for learning and action; (2) questioning and challenging ideas; and (3) climate of openness, trust and encouragement. (Enable Group Self-Organization, para.1)
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“The exercise, conducted over one or two class meetings, allows students to learn about well-balanced team construction, present themselves to … their classmates, interview each other, and choose who they would like to work with without the restrictions of seat proximity or prior connection. Results show students perceived that their teams were more available for meetings and exhibited more cohesiveness and higher performance than previous project teams, and strongly preferred this method.” (p.1)