Exploring the Effect of Different Team Compositions on Team Motivation, Student Satisfaction and Performance in Team Practical Activities

Abstract

The main source of diversity in engineering education usually is the distinct level of motivation, which sometimes causes lack of engagement. Working in motivated teams is likely to enhance the overall performance of the whole group. The aim of this paper is to find the best composition of teams in practical activities proposed in the classroom for engineering students to enhance team motivation. The experience with a group of Civil Engineering students at the University of West London is presented as a case study. This group was very diverse in the level of individual motivation. In this experiment, the whole group was split in two subgroups, and each one divided in teams of 3 people. For one of the subgroups, the distribution in teams was forced by the lecturer, while for the second one the students were allowed to freely distribute themselves. All teams were requested to solve a practical activity, consisting of the classification of several soils according to three different systems, based on experimental data equally provided to all the students. The different results obtained for both configurations of teams show an overall better performance for the “forced” composition, with a higher level of student satisfaction on the activity and on their achieved learning.