Longitudinal Effects of Team-Based Training on Students’ Peer Rating Quality

This research paper explores how longitudinal team-based training influences engineering students' peer rating quality. Engineering students will be expected to work in teams, and the ability to effectively cooperate and communicate is increasingly recognized by technical corporations. Teamwork is an important outcome included in the accreditation criteria of ABET and is also progressively integrated into engineering courses to a varying extent in engineering programs. However, the cumulative effect of the length of students' exposure to team-based projects, instruction in effective teamwork, and practice in peer evaluation is not well studied. Given the ad-hoc experience and previous literature, which is that student teams need time to overcome barriers and conflicts to perform well, we propose to study peer evaluation quality in a two-course sequence of team-based engineering classes in a large Midwestern public university. We hypothesize that peer evaluation behaviors, including rating scores and quality, for the second team-based course will be better on average compared to the peer evaluation behaviors in the first team-based course. Longitudinal use of a peer evaluation system would be expected to result in more accurate and consistent peer rating and students would get higher peer rating scores. Data from the two consecutive engineering foundation courses were analyzed using ANOVA and the Social Relations Model. Results showed no significant difference between peer rating scores in two consecutive mandatory courses. Rather, peer rating behaviors, or the patterns of peer ratings, restarted in the second course, which would suggest that students need to go through the same process of being better raters each time when they are put into new teams. This work informs university administrators and instructors that it takes time for student teams as they design curricula that help engineering students improve teaming skills. In particular, if this result generalizes to other course sequences and institutions with the learning objectives related to teamwork competency development, it might suggest that there is a benefit to reforming teams mid-semester in each course to give students additional experiences to apply what they have learned to more teams.