Work in Progress - Evaluating the impact of reflective thinking on learning objectives in undergraduate multidisciplinary project teams

The interprofessional projects program (TPRO) is a project-based course through which all undergraduate students are expected to develop their multidisciplinary teamwork, communication, and project management skills and knowledge while learning how to resolve ethical issues. Evaluation of these learning objectives is done through various performance measures of the program including a teamwork survey, a self-assessment of the learning objectives, and scores at IPRO Projects Day. A continued pilot for assessment is reflections, a written assignment team members complete 3 times over the semester. The fourth semester of our reflections pilot at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) includes questions about project management, teamwork, communications, and ethical issues, which are the meta-learning objectives of the program. We have compared the 11 teams that used reflections and 24 teams that did not use reflections in the Fall 06 semester, and 11 teams that used and 28 that did not in the Spring 07 semester. Overall, we find little meaningful differences between the teams on the performance measures.