2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET requires engineering programs such as Electrical and Computer (ECE) engineering programs to demonstrate the attainment of required student outcomes (SO) that prepare students for their professional careers after graduation. Among these, teamwork, as an important element, is highlighted in SO 5 as “an ability to function effectively on a team whose members together provide leadership, create a collaborative and inclusive environment, establish goals, plan tasks, and meet objectives”. It is thus paramount for ECE programs to include teamwork-related content and training in the curriculum and implement a process to assess the attainment of SO 5. In our ECE program, teamwork has been introduced to students in the curriculum as early as in the first-year freshman-level ECE introductory lab course. Moreover, measures and assessment data from this introductory class along with data from several higher-level ECE courses have been used to gauge the attainment of SO 5. The assessment results from this introductory class serve as a useful baseline and reference for understanding the trend of SO 5 attainment across different year groups of students ranging from freshmen to seniors.

In this paper, we will present some successful efforts in achieving the following goals: teaching teamwork principles, fostering a positive teamwork culture, and training teamwork practices in the Intro to ECE lab course, a first-year freshman-level hands-on class. In this course, students participate in a series of hands-on lab assignments and a 4-week long course project in teams of two or three members. To facilitate achieving the aforementioned goals, we have designed the course material and adjusted the lecture pace to better align with the project schedule, and also created a series of effective teamwork activities that not only enhance students’ teamwork experience but also help teams to complete the project on time. In the full paper, we will elaborate on these teamwork activities and evaluate their effectiveness based on students’ feedback.

Student survey results from recent offerings of this course have been very positive and suggest that the teamwork-related teaching endeavors we have introduced in this introductory course have been successful and effective in promoting students’ teamwork experience. To effectively assess SO 5, the survey questions have been deliberately chosen or modified based on a set of popular industry-adopted teamwork survey questions.
In this paper, we will also provide details of the measures and data collected from this course and the criteria adopted to assess the attainment of SO 5. Assessment results from recent course evaluations will be shared in the full paper as well. We feel that some of our teaching practices in this course could be adapted to other EE or ECE programs to meet similar needs.