Assessing Teamwork and Collaboration in High School Students

Various policy papers assert that teamwork is an essential skill for the 21stcentury workforce. However, outside of organizational psychology research with adult populations, there are few reliable assessments of this construct with suitable validity evidence for test scores. To redress this issue, self-report, situational judgment, and teacher-report assessments of teamwork were developed for high school students. Various multivariate techniques were used to determine the structure of the scales, including factor and latent class analysis. Measures showed reasonable reliability and satisfactory validity evidence: Self-report, situational judgment, and teacher-report measures intercorrelated, and these measures also related to academic achievement. The advantages and disadvantages of each methodology are discussed, as are possible uses of this assessment system (e.g., evaluation of school-based programs that infuse curricula with modules on teamwork).