Using assessment to improve teams in engineering education

The growing importance of the use of teams in education and business requires the development of effective and user-friendly assessment and training processes. The objectives of the present study were two fold. The first objective was to design and evaluate a simple and usable assessment and training intervention strategy for improving team functioning. The second objective was to further validate a previously developed self-report measure of team functioning (the team process check) by examining the relation between the measure and objective ratings of the behavior of teams engaged in a design task. The work-in-progress will describe a process for continuous improvement, which includes the systematic assessment of team functioning, and the utilization of that assessment to generate viable improvement plans.