2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

As higher education continues to expand internationally, the number of overseas students studying at Western universities has increased in recent years. The trend of growth in overseas students studying one-year engineering postgraduate taught (master’s) programmes in the UK is particularly evident. Most of these overseas students are from China, and their cultural and educational backgrounds are generally different from those known in Western societies, which may have an impact on their academic performance. It is also well known that the successful completion of an engineering project often depends not only on how much you have learned from books but also on the seamless integration of teamwork skills and technical knowledge. Hence, it is indeed a challenge for engineering educators to effectively teach teamwork skills to students with different backgrounds, particularly in highly internationalised (mixed Chinese and Western) teaching and learning environments. On the other hand, with the increasing complexity of the engineering industry in the real world, university graduates not only need to acquire professional knowledge but also need to possess good transferable skills to ensure their academic success and enhance their career readiness.
In this study, we designed a workshop approach to provide international chemical engineering master’s students with the opportunity to develop teamwork skills and attempted to analyse and define appropriate team roles and dynamics from the students’ team performance in higher education classrooms. In order to further optimise the existing teaching of chemical engineering project design and emphasise collaborative problem-solving in a team, we integrated board games and hands-on projects into the workshop to engage students in different learning activities. Subsequently, after students completed each of the activities, we introduced a teamwork assessment questionnaire that enabled students to evaluate their performances and strengths in working with others.
At the early stage of the study, we combined the Belbin Team Role Test to further understand the personality tendencies of master's students in teamwork. Preliminary findings suggest that most overseas students (mainly Chinese) participating in the programme have a social-oriented personality. Therefore, this study will also draw on the Belbin team roles as a basis for exploring and developing a new definition of the appropriate role description and analysis of master’s students in a UK university. This study highlights the importance of transferrable skills training in postgraduate engineering education and provides a framework for curriculum design aimed at enhancing engineering students' teamwork and collaborative skills, particularly in international teaching and learning environments.