What Happens When Students Try to Work Collaboratively

This 3-page article, written by Paul Horwitz, was published in the Spring 2018 issue of the Concord Consortium’s biannual newsletter. This article describes analysis of the log data from one of the Teaching Teamwork’s online electronics activities. The goal of the Teaching Teamwork project is to measure how effectively electronics students work in teams. This project looks for patterns in the data and tries to answer questions, such as: do the team members collaborate or do they mostly work on their own? Are their actions coordinated or independent? Does a leader emerge to direct them? How does each member contribute to the ultimate success or failure of the team?