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Effects of the Team-Based Approach on Individual Learning 1.Introduction

This study is a part of the ES21C project at Oklahoma State University. The goal of ES21C is to prepare OSU electrical engineering students to meet the challenges of engineering in the 21st century. The proposal for the ES21C project gives the following summary:

“Engineering students learn what we teach them, but often do not become what we intend.[Students learn] the behaviors that let [them] succeed in classes, but these behaviors do not always correlate with success in engineering. Engineering Students for the 21st Century is a reform program for undergraduate engineering that is trying to align the behaviors that are taught in our program with those that help students succeed. To accomplish this we plan to transition from emphasizing acquisition of knowledge to emphasizing student development.”1

Our research problem relates to the overall ES21C project, and by extension the transition to team-based learning6, as a “devil’s advocate” test. Many previous studies focus on the improvement of students’ grades but they neglect the possibility of loss of conceptual and procedural understanding. We attempt to objectively determine the possible negative effects of team-based learning. We also hope to discover if the pair-programming model produces the same results as regular team-based classes or if there is a noticeable improvement in student understanding.

The paper describes the overall design of the experiment and outlines the method we propose to use to study the effects of various tiers of team involvement on the students' learning. This will consist of a "three-pronged attack" in which the lecture portion of the course will remain nominally unchanged while the lab section will use differing levels of team interaction. These interaction levels we will vary from each sample group and will attempt to determine the effects of each level and isolate the level that correlates to the highest student conceptual understanding in the non-lab course work.

The paper is also a call for participation in this study. The reason behind this call is that, despite the matching and removal of outliers, it will be difficult to present statistically significant results due to the small sample sizes of the different methods. Increasing participation, thereby increasing sample sizes, will greatly help increase the statistical significance of the results.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the related work and some background knowledge necessary for understanding the project. Section 3 describes our methods in detail. Section 4 lists the possible outcomes from this study. Section 5 calls for collaboration, inviting other instructors teaching a similar course to adopt our methods and participate in the study.

2.Related Work

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Pitts, J., & Teague, P., & Cheville, A., & Bunting, C., & Sohoni, S. (2007, June), Effects Of The Team Based Approach On Individual Learning Paper presented at 2007 Annual Conference & Exposition, Honolulu, Hawaii. 10.18260/1-2--2313