The Influence of Feedback on Teamwork and Professional Skills in an Authentic Process Development Project

摘要

Professional skills are believed to be a critical aspect of an engineer's job. Providing students with feedback on professional skills can help students further develop these skills and enculturate them into disciplinary and industrial communities of practice. However, studies of the influence of feedback on students' professional skills are uncommon and needed. This study presents detailed examples of feedback related to professional skills and investigates the influence of that feedback on student teams' subsequent engagement in professional skills activities. It uses episodes as an analytical framework to examine meetings, termed coaching sessions, between a faculty member and student teams. We focus on using episodes to identify the major themes of discussion and to specifically identify the role of that guidance in the students' subsequent engagement in activities. We found that feedback in the project studied was given on the following professional skills: teamwork, communication (written and verbal), project management, impact of engineering solutions on the economic and societal context, symbols of legitimacy, and written documentation. On average about 40% of the total coaching episodes related to professional skills. Most of these episodes were nested within the context of core disciplinary content and concepts. The types of feedback given to students included affirmative and corrective feedback with specific techniques of elaboration and revoicing. In addition, some discussion was found to be neutral. When student teams were given directive feedback regarding their written work products, this feedback was taken up by the teams almost immediately.