Comparing Team Member Effectiveness in Integrated and Non-Integrated First-year Introductory Design Courses

This research paper looks at whether the formal integration of three required introductory courses across two university colleges improves students’ effectiveness as team members working together on a final design project and presentation. A new integration program was implemented for six sections of a Design Thinking course during the Fall 2016 semester, while another six sections of the introductory Design Thinking course were taught without the formal integration. In both classes, a multi-part team project was assigned for the last half of the semester. Teams were periodically asked to rate each team member’s performance using the Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness (CATME) tool. By analyzing the results of this peer evaluation in integrated versus non-integrated format of the course, we examine the student contributions and grades in the final project and their correlation. Insights from our analysis indicate that teams in both integrated and non-integrated sections worked well. We also found a correlation between the student contribution and grades in the final project. We investigate the potential for interdisciplinary pedagogy as we continue administering this STEMHumanities integration program.