Work in Progress: First-time Use of CATME in a Design Course

Being a member of a team is a common experience for many people, e.g., during athletic endeavors, as students in school, or as colleagues in the workplace. The idea, however, that any team will function at a high level (i.e., productively and constructively) without purposeful and well-informed effort is not true. The literature on forming teams supports the notion that teams thrive when team members feel psychologically safe, are engaged in setting goals, and are dependent on and are accountable to one another. It is unclear, however, what the appropriate conditions are in a given setting (e.g., athletics, school, workplace) that will encourage the formation of healthy teams and appropriately engaged team members. The goal of this study was to introduce, for the first time, CATME in Stanford University's mechanical engineering capstone design course (ME 170, Mechanical Engineering Design: Integrating Context with Engineering) so that it could facilitate the establishment of healthy team dynamics among student design teams. Specifically, we asked the following questions: (1) does the format of the course support healthy team practices? (2) do students find CATME sufficient/helpful for learning about their strengths and ways to improve? and (3) how healthy are the design teams? CATME was introduced in ME 170 as a tool to evaluate the extent to which teams were engaged in healthy team practices and to generate discussion within teams about healthy team dynamics. Following the end of the course, semi-structured interviews were conducted to learn about student CATME experiences. Based on the CATME scores from 13 design teams (51 students) and interviews of 2 students, we found that: (1) the structure of the course does support healthy team practices; (2) students may benefit from a team assessment tool, in addition to CATME, that requires structured, written feedback from everyone to be shared; (3) the student design teams were more healthy than not.