SMARTER Teamwork: System for Management, Assessment, Research, Training, Education, and Remediation for Teamwork

The rapid adoption of Team-Maker and the Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness (CATME), tools for team formation and peer evaluation, make it possible to extend their success to have a significant impact on the development of team skills in higher education. The web-based systems are used by over 700 faculty at over 200 institutions internationally. This paper and its accompanying poster will describe strategies for broadening the scope of those tools into a complete system for the management of teamwork in undergraduate education. The System for the Management, Assessment, Research, Training, Education, and Remediation of Teamwork (SMARTER Teamwork) has three specific goals: 1) to equip students to work in teams by providing them with training and feedback, 2) to equip faculty to manage student teams by providing them with information and tools to facilitate best practices, and 3) to equip researchers to understand teams by broadening the system’s capabilities to collect additional types of data so that a wider range of research questions can be studied through a secure researcher interface. The three goals of the project support each other in hierarchical fashion: research informs faculty practice, faculty determine the students’ experience, which, if well managed based on research findings, equips students to work in teams. Our strategies for achieving these goals are based on a well-accepted training model that has five elements: information, demonstration, practice, feedback, and remediation. Different outcomes are expected for each group of people. For the students, both individual outcomes, such as student learning, and team outcomes, such as the development of shared mental models, are expected. For the faculty, individual outcomes such as faculty learning and faculty satisfaction are expected. The outcomes for researchers will be community outcomes, that is, benefits for stakeholders outside the research team, such as generating new knowledge for teaming theory and disseminating best practices. Measuring these outcomes is the basis for the project’s evaluation plan. Research Overview. The broad and deep scope of the proposed SMARTER Teamwork research is summarized in Figure 1. The figure addresses the project’s three broad research goals, people impacted, strategies for achieving the goals, and measureable outcomes. Goals. The proposed work has three goals: 1), equip students to work in teams; 2), equip faculty to manage teams; and 3), equip this research team to understand student teams. These goals support each other in hierarchical fashion: research informs faculty practice, faculty determine the students’ experience, which, if well managed based on research findings, should equip students to work in teams. People. People are the groups that will use the proposed system: students, faculty, and researchers. The hierarchy of people reflects the hierarchy of goals: the work of the research team supports the work of faculty, which in turn supports the work of students and their teams. Figure 1. System for the Management, Assessment, Research, Training, Education, and Remediation for Teamwork informs determines the environment for INFORMATION 1. Why teams are important 2. What makes a good team member 3. Overview of SMARTER Teamwork toolkit