2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work-in-progress paper investigates what elements of project teams assist students in developing professional skills. We define professional skills as the non-discipline-specific skills that support students’ work (i.e. communication, time management, etc.) and student project teams as co-curricular, student-run activities that complete an engineering task, whether for a national competition or for accomplishing their self-set goals. Project teams are often cited as activities where students can learn technical and professional skills; however, it’s unclear which structures or mechanisms on project teams assist or prompt students’ professional skill development.

To address this topic, two focus groups were conducted with a total of eight students from different project teams. The focus group structure was inspired by Group Level Assessment and follows the stages of generating, appreciating, reflecting, and understanding. During the generating, appreciating, and reflecting stages the students created a graphical representation of their project teams based on activity systems from Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). Activity systems are used to represent a system, such as project teams holistically and are composed of six categories: the members, the tools used, the rules, the surrounding community, the way work is divided, and the goal of the activity. Then students completed another iteration with their diagrams by adding the skills that they have learned from their project team experience based on the Student Involvement Framework. The Student Involvement Framework contains a list of professional skills associated with project teams that were available to students to reference during the focus group. For the understanding stage, the students were asked to discuss their experiences on project teams and how they learned professional skills as members.

The diagrams were analyzed using activity system categories as a priori codes to investigate if professional skills are connected with specific activity system categories. All skills listed in the Student Involvement Framework were written on at least one diagram. While there were not clear connections between activity systems and the majority of the professional skills, some skills were repeatedly connected to specific project team elements or requirements.