Sociotechnical Interventions for Nurturing Successful Team Learning Experiences

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As the need for collaboration in the workplace increases, teaching teamwork is important for preparing students to be successful in their chosen careers. Instructors who want to incorporate teamwork into their courses face challenges: how to group students into effective teams given the learning goals and, once formed, how to support teammates in connecting to create a successful learning experience. Today, instructors struggle to address these challenges, often delegate team formation to the students themselves, and conduct few, if any, activities aimed at team development. This project will produce 1) technological innovations that will enable instructors to algorithmically group students into teams with effective compositions given the learning goals and 2) intervention activities to nurture the foundations of teamwork such as team identity and psychological safety in those teams. The activities and technological innovations will be motivated by relevant theories, refined through design sessions with stakeholders, and empirically tested in university courses. The project outcomes have the potential to help the many instructors assigning team projects decide (1) how to best group students into teams given the context-specific goals of a course, (2) how to achieve those best groups with an intelligent team formation tool, and (3) how to help teams create the psychological safety that fosters success. Students are expected to benefit by being assigned to teams where they can best utilize their individual strengths, by experiencing a fairer team formation process, and by learning how to engage with teammates most effectively. Graduate students aiding the research activities in this project will gain knowledge and skills in human-computer interaction, learning science, and computer science, and will learn about the interdisciplinary design and research process necessary to create successful cyberlearning tools.This project investigates, in large course settings, a conjunction of new algorithmic team formation and social techniques, to support team development. The project integrates social and learning science and technology design to advance knowledge of (1) how team composition relates to collaborative process, team performance, and team satisfaction for specific learning goals; (2) learnersourcing techniques to generate team compositions that students prefer and to involve them in configuring these compositions in a team formation tool; (3) interventions to help a team develop foundations for successful learning experiences and guidelines for which interventions teams should perform, given the team’s composition and goals; and (4) how different categories of learners perceive the value and fairness of algorithmic team formation and how they make that determination. These four research goals will be addressed through a design-based research methodology—where an iterative approach is applied to the design, deployment, and evaluation of both the technology and the interventions—drawing from theories of learning, team composition, and team building. The research efforts will advance our knowledge of how best to support collaborative learning activities and progress toward a future where instructors can combine social processes and intelligent tools to deliver effective team-based learning experiences for all students.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.