Impact of Team Functions in an Introductory Design Course on Student Performance in Later Design Courses:A Longitudinal Study

摘要

In ME Tools, an introductory undergraduate mechanical engineering course, students work in teams, acquiring design and process development knowledge. Throughout the course, each student assumes one of four possible roles: manager, systems engineer, analyst, or details designer. Team function assignments are based on student response to a short questionnaire. This paper reports on the findings of a longitudinal study that tracked the performance of 204 students as they progressed through the design curriculum up to and including the final year project course. Tracking is achieved using repeated measures ANOVA (RMANOVA). Interactions between the introductory course grades and sub-grades of the major deliverables (report and contest) and those from the other design courses were statistically examined after being divided according to team function. The strengths of these interactions (p values) are reported, with the impact of team functions on performance in the design courses taken by the students often being shown up to three years later in their curriculum. It was also found that 64% of all teams formed for the capstone project contained two or more members of the team originally formed in ME Tools.