“Are schools not properly preparing computer science students for group work in professional situations?” asks Tim Van Tongeren in response to a quote about students actively avoiding group work in completing their (group) assignments. My first thought is “How do you prepare someone for group work as a collaborative experience?” It also made me remember a comment from Brian Marick’s blog back in June: “Agile projects have some tricky differences from conventional projects – …(including) a greater dependence on trust between members of different interest groups “ At the time of Brian’s post, I considered responding by saying that I would hesitate to say that there is a significant difference in the dependence on trust between members in agile and non-agile projects. I think that all projects require strong trust to be collaborative, not just agile projects. (I admit to very limited exposure to agile projects, but I have seen the impact of trust and dis-trust on non-agile projects. In my experience, it is absolutely critical to effective collaboration of any sort.)
That brings me to Tim’s question, and a second question in return: How important is trust, or lack of trust, in the students’ choices about whether to work together for group projects? If trust is required for collaboration, as I have observed and as some research is beginning to bear out (I can provide the academic references if anyone is interested), is it reasonable to expect that a teacher can somehow generate trust between group members to enable this collaborative experience?
I do think that it would help students to have had a genuinely collaborative experience. Without it, they may be less likely to put in the work to be part of a collaborative team. I’m not sure that any computer science, or even MIS / business school, class is going to address that well without specifically addressing trust issues. (Business schools are notorious for their group projects, but I haven’t seen much greater success there either.)
I’ve been on a project that did not begin, but became incredibly collaborative. Without exception, the team members were changed by the experience. It never would have happened by just having someone tell us to be collaborative and/or to trust each other, though. The trust was earned, over time and through positive experiences, at both the group and the individual pair levels. It was also fostered and consistently demonstrated by a talented project manager and the project leads. Given the constraints that schools are functioning under these days, can we expect them to prepare students for that aspect of professional work? If you think of what has made your groups successful, could that be replicated through class assignments?
Or is there a different question altogether – if most projects are not as collaborative as we would like, is the classroom perhaps more correctly mirroring reality than our desires?
Perhaps non-collaborative classrooms train us to create a reality we don’t desire.
Comment by Dale Emery — September 17, 2003 @ 4:39 pm
I think very few academic environments foster collaboration. Most times, students are competing for grades and such competition impairs a collaborative environment.
There are some cases that are different though. One of my computer science courses in college required pairing with another student for the whole semester. (The intention was that the workload was so heavy, you would divide the work amongst the two. We chose pair programming instead and had an easier time than the rest of the class.) Other classes required significant collaboration as well.
In these cases, we were still competing for grades, but at least within the project team, we were co-dependent for our success and therefore had to learn to collaborate well. I found these experiences invaluable and did my best work when collaborating with others.
Chris
Comment by Christian Sepulveda — September 18, 2003 @ 4:24 am
To Dale’s comment – That would be unfortunate, but is certainly possible! Before I jump to conclusions about your source of concern, though, I’d like to know what you think are the contributing factors. Chris mentions competition for grades, but it could be other things as well.
To Chris’s comment – It sounds like your first try at collaboration was voluntary, but I may be reading between the lines. If it was, and it was successful, the experience would impact your future willingness to collaborate. I’m curious about what convinced you that collaboration was necessary, though. I’ve done many classes with group assignments and it is not uncommon to have problems with free-loaders. Even when individual grades were pro-rated according to group evaluations (you lost points on your group grade if everyone in your group said you contributed poorly), there seemed to be a belief that no one would actually dare to downgrade them, at the student or teacher level. What helped convince you?
Comment by Heather — September 21, 2003 @ 7:50 am