Paper Authors

Abstract

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract

Combined Individual-Team Based Project

Abstract

The basic manufacturing processes course was selected for an interdisciplinary team project for ABET requirements by the Industrial and Management Systems Engineering (IMSE) Department. The project is an integration of design criteria, material properties, mechanical properties and product cost. A software package is used to assist the students in the evaluation of various materials and structural shapes. To improve the student learning, assessments are made to evaluate student progress during the project and to determine improvements to be made in the software, in the project problem and in the evaluation of team performance.

Introduction

One problem in the project is that some team members have minimal participation in the project. One or two students will do most of the work, and the other team members expect the same grade for their being a “member” of the team. The first approach to correct this problem was to have each team member evaluate all team members, including themselves. The performance factor was multiplied by the project score to give the individual team member score. This has helped a little, but students are hesitant to give fellow classmates a low grade even though the evaluations are considered confidential.

The team based course project1-6 has been used for several years and the problem has been changed each semester so the students do not copy previous projects. In the first years of the project, teams were formed and the project was graded at the end of the semester. These reports were often poor as the students had difficulty in writing reports, in interpreting the results they obtained, and in presenting their recommendations for the best material and shape. A suggested report format was given to the students and the reports were better, but some reports were rushed at the last minute and others decided to uses their own format. Since there was only one report, the questionnaire to evaluate students’ learning was administered on the day the report was submitted.

The next step6 was to change the grading from a single report to have three preliminary reports, each of 10 points, and then the final report of 70 points. The purposes of the multiple reports were three fold. First, the students would need to start the project earlier to as the preliminary reports were due earlier in the semester and thus some work would be required before the final project. Secondly, this was an opportunity to use multiple assessments to evaluate progress during the semester. The assessments asked some specific questions about what progress they had made and indicated specific items that would be expected in the final report. Many of the assessment questions were milestones which the students should have completed or should be considered for the next report. Finally, these reports provided an opportunity to provide feedback so the final report would be more complete as well as be written in better form. One of the problems is that many students do not know the basics of writing reports, such as that the titles of tables should be above the table whereas the title of figures

• Citation

• Format
  • APA
  • APA - LaTeX bibitem
  • MLA
  • MLA - LaTeX bibitem
  • Bibtex
  • EndNote - RIS

Creese, R., & Gupta, D. (2010, June), Combined Individual Team Based Project Paper presented at 2010 Annual Conference & Exposition, Louisville, Kentucky. 10.18260/1-2--15760