Effective building and development of student teamwork using personality types in engineering courses

Abstract

Engineers have a high calling of contributing to the betterment of humanity. Engineering projects have become more complicated in recent years. One solution to solving complex problems and working on engineering projects is team building. Competent and effective team building requires time and effort in the workplace or school. To best prepare students to meet the engineering profession's demands and the needs of experienced professionals, teamwork and team building need to be taught in the educational system. Teamwork is also a necessary component of an engineering education. This paper presents ways educators can form student teams for class projects and assignments in order to develop better student teamwork skills. Different ways of forming student groups are examined in this paper. Those include using Carl Jung's and Isabel Briggs Myers' personality test, using a random lottery system, and pairing motivated with less motivated students. These methods were used in civil and mechanical engineering courses where students had to work on course projects. The assessment of the effectiveness of those methods was conducted by using self and peer evaluations forms, peer group evaluation forms, instructor observations on team dynamics, conducting student interviews, and evaluating final project quality. The observations of this study are analyzed to explore how the different ways of pairing students for group course projects influence team building skills.