Sociotechnical Interventions for Nurturing Successful Team Learning Experiences

随着工作场所对合作的需求增加，教授团队合作对于让学生在他们选择的职业中取得成功是很重要的。想要将团队合作融入课程的教师面临着挑战：如何根据学习目标将学生组织成有效的团队，一旦形成，如何支持团队成员建立联系，以创造成功的学习体验。今天，教师们努力应对这些挑战，经常将团队组建委托给学生自己，并且很少（如果有的话）开展针对团队发展的活动。该项目将产生1)技术创新，使教师能够通过算法将学生分组，并根据学习目标进行有效的组合；2)干预活动，以培养团队合作的基础，如团队认同和团队中的心理安全。这些活动和技术创新将受到相关理论的推动，通过与利益相关者的设计会议进行改进，并在大学课程中进行实证检验。项目成果有可能帮助许多分配团队项目的教师决定(1)如何根据课程的特定情境目标将学生最好地分组，(2)如何使用智能团队形成工具实现这些最佳小组，以及(3)如何帮助团队创造促进成功的心理安全感。学生们被分配到能够最大限度地发挥个人优势的团队中，通过体验更公平的团队组建过程，以及通过学习如何最有效地与队友合作，都有望从中受益。协助本计划研究活动的研究生将获得人机交互、学习科学和计算机科学方面的知识和技能，并将学习创建成功的网络学习工具所必需的跨学科设计和研究过程。该项目在大型课程设置中研究了新算法团队形成和社交技术的结合，以支持团队发展。该项目整合了社会和学习科学技术设计，以促进以下方面的知识：(1)团队组成与协作过程、团队绩效和团队对特定学习目标的满意度之间的关系；(2)学习者溯源技术，生成学生喜欢的团队作文，并让他们参与在团队形成工具中配置这些作文；(3)根据团队的组成和目标，帮助团队建立成功学习经验的基础和指导方针；(4)不同类别的学习者如何感知算法团队形成的价值和公平性，以及他们如何做出这一决定。这四个研究目标将通过基于设计的研究方法来解决，该方法将迭代方法应用于技术和干预措施的设计、部署和评估，并借鉴学习、团队组成和团队建设的理论。研究工作将推动我们对如何最好地支持协作学习活动的认识，并朝着教师可以结合社会过程和智能工具为所有学生提供有效的基于团队的学习体验的未来前进。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.