Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Página 697 de 957
solving tasks. That is, assessment of group-work ability achievement can be undertaken
without adding to the student or teacher/tutor workload.
Adoption of any one or more of these various assessment protocols is discretionary, and
all can be accommodated within the two curriculum frameworks indicated in Tables 1 and
2.
A significant obstacle to individual assessment in group and team environments has been
lack of definition of individual attributes that contribute to affective group/team
performance, and lack of verifiable criteria for measurement of those attributes in
individuals [16]. Absence of verifiable criteria, combined with student dissatisfaction
about group assessment has resulted in many attempts to incorporate group problemsolving
being abandoned because it is “too hard”, with the result that this crucial aspect of
relevance to professional practice and career development is also abandoned.
Each of the individual professional abilities required for effective team performance
outlined above can be (and must be) translated into learning goals, curriculum
frameworks and assessment criteria. It is not the purpose of this paper to discuss
curriculum frameworks or learning methods, but such discussion would inevitably
gravitate towards a mix of brief on-line notes to explain each of the seven abilities, how
they are to be engaged and how they are to be assessed, and practical group assignments
that would allow students to learn by participating and critically considering their own
and others’ performance on each of the seven abilities. Further it would lean towards the
practical group assignments being within the present technical learning programme. That
is, no separate or additional group assignments need be undertaken; teamwork abilities
can be observed and assessed in parallel with observation and assessment of other (eg
technical) abilities.
The Transitional Criteria Assessment (TCA) framework allows for simultaneous
assessment at all levels from bare minimum technical pass level (eg 50%) through to
“brilliant” level associated with outstanding students in each stage of a course. The TCA
framework allows all students to be assessed fairly and transparently regardless of
differing abilities, performance and achievements by requiring all students to satisfy
minimum accreditation requirements in order to achieve a pass grade, with the option of
passing additional layers of assessment criteria (typically additional professional skills) in
order to “transit” to higher grades. Assessment of individual teamwork abilities is readily
accommodated in the TCA framework by including some or all of these within the
minimum pass-grade criteria, or within the “additional abilities” options for transition to
higher grades as indicated in Table 1. Alternatively, development of teamwork abilities can
be mandatory and progressive, eg by distribution across a programme as suggested in
Table 2.
Conclusion
Development of teamwork abilities has been identified as an imperative part of
engineering education, due to governments’ Innovative Society policies and initiatives, and
due to the importance of team design to innovative and complex engineering projects
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011