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1. Cross-functional Team Course Design Project in Engineering

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--34358  

   Fila, Nicholas; Rover, Diane; Mina, Mani; Jones, Phillip (June 2020, 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   This work-in-progress research paper explores the intersection of cross-functional teamwork and design thinking within the course design process through collaborative autoethnography. Collaborative autoethnography uses individual and dialogic reflections to provide a detailed and nuanced exploration of experiences within a culture (e.g., a course design team) and generate insights that might inform broader community of individuals who experience related cultures. In this study, we investigate how individual educators attempt to shape and are shaped by a unique team course design process in electrical and computer engineering. The participant-researchers in this study are three electrical and computer engineering faculty members and one engineering education researcher who have participated in a six-semester-long course redesign effort. The effort has emphasized building and utilizing a new cross-functional team approach, imbued with design thinking strategies, to support improved professional formation and student-centeredness within an embedded systems course for electrical and computer engineering students. In this study, data collection and analysis were integrated and iterative. This process engaged cycles of setting writing prompts, individual writing, group discussion and reflection, and setting new writing prompts. This process was repeated as participant-researchers and the team as a whole refined their insights, explored emergent topics, and connected their observations to external research and scholarship. The autoethnographic process is ongoing, but five themes have emerged that describe key features of the team course design process and experience: (1) uncertainty, (2) navigating the team, (3) navigating the self, (4) navigating the system, and (5) process. The paper features a collection of participant-researcher reflections related to these emergent themes. 

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2. The differences between individual project and team project settings in an interdisciplinary REU site

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--35302  

   Li, Hua; Jin, Kai (June 2020, ASEE Annual Conference 2020)

   null (Ed.)
3. Operationalizing team commitment in a project-based learning environment

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE56618.2022.9962577  

   Jaiswal, Aparajita; Karabiyik, Tugba; Thomas, Paul; Magana, Alejandra J. (October 2022, Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE))

   Commitment is a multi-dimensional construct that has been extensively researched in the context of organizations. Organizational and professional commitment have been positively associated with technical performance, client service, attention to detail, and degree of involvement with one’s job. However, there is a relative dearth of research in terms of team commitment, especially in educational settings. Teamwork is considered a 21stcentury skill and higher education institutions are focusing on helping students to develop teamwork skills by applied projects in the coursework. But studies have demonstrated that creating a team is not enough to help students build teamwork skills. Literature supports the use of team contracts to bolster commitment, among team members. However, the relationship between team contracts and team commitment has not been formally operationalized.This research category study presents a mixed-methods approach towards characterizing and operationalizing team commitment exhibited by students enrolled in a sophomore-level systems analysis and design course by analyzing team contracts and team retrospective reflections. The course covers concepts pertaining to information systems development and includes a semester-long team project where the students work together in four or five member teams to develop the project deliverables. The students have prior software development experiences through an introductory systems development course as well as multiple programming courses. The data for this study was collected through the team contracts signed by students belonging to one of the 23 teams of this course. The study aims to answer the following research question: How can team commitment be characterized in a sophomore-level system analysis and design course among the student teams?A rubric was developed to quantify the team commitment levels of students based on their responses on the team contracts. Students were classified as high or low commitment based on the rubric scores. The emergent themes of high and low commitment teams were also presented. The results indicated that the high commitment teams were focused on setting goals, effective communication, and having mechanisms in place for timely feedback and improvement. On the other hand, low commitment teams did not articulate the goals of the project, they demonstrated a lack of dedication for attending team meetings regularly, working as a team, and had a lack of proper coordination while working together. 

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4. CS5604 (Information Retrieval) Fall 2020 Front-end (FE) Team Project

   Cao, Yusheng; Mazloom, Reza; Ogunleye, Makanjuola; Chekuri, Satvik; Fox, Edward A. (December 2020, Information storage and retrieval)

   null (Ed.)

   With the demand and abundance of information increasing over the last two decades, generations of computer scientists are trying to improve the whole process of information searching, retrieval, and storage. With the diversification of the information sources, users' demand for various requirements of the data has also changed drastically both in terms of usability and performance. Due to the growth of the source material and requirements, correctly sorting, filtering, and storing has given rise to many new challenges in the field. With the help of all four other teams on this project, we are developing an information retrieval, analysis, and storage system to retrieve data from Virginia Tech's Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD), Twitter, and Web Page archives. We seek to provide an appropriate data research and management tool to the users to access specific data. The system will also give certain users the authority to manage and add more data to the system. This project's deliverable will be combined with four others to produce a system usable by Virginia Tech's library system to manage, maintain, and analyze these archives. This report attempts to introduce the system components and design decisions regarding how it has been planned and implemented. Our team has developed a front end web interface that is able to search, retrieve, and manage three important content collection types: ETDs, tweets, and web pages. The interface incorporates a simple hierarchical user permission system, providing different levels of access to its users. In order to facilitate the workflow with other teams, we have containerized this system and made it available on the Virginia Tech cloud server. The system also makes use of a dynamic workflow system using a KnowledgeGraph and Apache Airflow, providing high levels of functional extensibility to the system. This allows curators and researchers to use containerised services for crawling, pre-processing, parsing, and indexing their custom corpora and collections that are available to them in the system. 

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5. Building community in a research project team through identity sharing

   Robinson, M.; Thanheiser, E.; Sugimoto, A.; Penner, D.; Han, S. B.; Koestler, C.; Felton-Koestler, M. D.; Bartels, H. E.; Thompson, J. A.; & Wolfe, L. L. (January 2022, Proceedings of the forty-fourth annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education)

   Lischka, A. E.; Dyer, E. B.; Jones, R. S.; Lovett, J. N.; Strayer, J.; & Drown, S. (Ed.)