Team learning developing interdisciplinary project teams

Teachers of STEM students and employers of graduates recognize that success in many professions requires effective multi-disciplinary team performance. While there is abundant evidence that having "diversity" on a team can contribute to greater creativity and innovation, it is not clear how a group of individuals come to function as a team or how they learn from one other [1,2]. To better understand how university students learn in multi-disciplinary teams, 256 undergraduate students participating in teams in the spring of 2010 at a Midwest university were studied. Data collection included self-reported efficacy for cross-disciplinary team learning (CDTL), as well as self-reported attitudes toward team processes and outcomes, and individual characteristics. During the course of the semester, overall self-efficacy for CDTL increased across all respondents. However, a large number of individual students also displayed decreases in self-efficacy from the beginning to the end of the semester. A previously developed framework for CDTL [2] was further tested and modified as part of this study. Individuals with a high “identity” score at the start of the semester tended to report a smaller increase in this score at the end semester, probably for two reasons: they had less room for improvement, and greater likelihood of overestimating their abilities at the start. Several other findings related to team processes and characteristics were identified and will be discussed.