Improving the assessment of transferable skills in chemistry through evaluation of current practice

The development and assessment of transferable skills acquired by students, such as communication and teamwork, within undergraduate degrees is being increas-ingly emphasised. Many instructors have designed and implemented assessment tasks with the aim to provide students with opportunities to acquire and demon-strate these skills. We have now applied our previously published tool to evaluate whether assessment tasks allow students to demonstrate achievement of these transferable skills. The tool allows detailed evaluation of the alignment of any as-sessment item against the claimed set of learning outcomes. We present here two examples in which use of the tool provides evidence for the level of achievement of transferable skills and a further example of use of the tool to inform curricu-lum design and pedagogy, with the goal of increasing achievement of communi-cation and teamwork bench marks. Implications for practice in assessment design for learning are presented

Self-beliefs, transactive memory systems, and collective identification in teams:Articulating the socio-cognitive underpinnings of COHUMAIN

Socio-cognitive theory conceptualizes individual contributors as both enactors of cognitive processes and targets of a social context’s determinative influences. The present research investigates how contributors’ metacognition or self-beliefs, combine with others’ views of themselves to inform collective team states related to learning about other agents (i.e., transactive memory systems) and forming social attachments with other agents (i.e., collective team identification), both important teamwork states that have implications for team collective intelligence. We test the predictions in a longitudinal study with 78 teams. Additionally, we provide interview data from industry experts in human–artificial intelligence teams. Our findings contribute to an emerging socio-cognitive architecture for COllective HUman-MAchine INtelligence (i.e., COHUMAIN) by articulating its underpinnings in individual and collective cognition and metacognition. Our resulting model has implications for the critical inputs necessary to design and enable a higher level of integration of human and machine teammates

Increasing team ideation by sequencing the task type and content

While ideation is accepted as integral to the design process, the methods forfacilitating ideation within teams are not as well understood. We propose andtest the usefulness of sequencing variations in task type and content to facilitate team ideation in a team creativity task. In a repeated measures design we assessed team ideation (96 teams) before and after exposure to one of three randomized variations in sequences of task type and content. After thisintervention, teams exposed to tasks that were dissimilar in content or typeexperienced the highest increase in variety of ideas produced. Our results arerelevant for practice as they suggest that structuring team tasks to alternatecontent may help to improve team creativity

The role of teamwork on team performance in extreme military environments:An empirical study

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to explore the extent to which teamwork (developed either during an initial training phase or during a subsequent deployment phase) is influenced by the nature of the team’s environment (extreme vs non-extreme) and the extent to which teamwork is one of the explaining mechanisms for team performance.Design/methodology/approachData was collected from 60 teams at 2 time-points: training phase in The Netherlands or Germany and deployment phase (in locations such as Afghanistan and Bosnia-Herzegovina).FindingsThis study’s results indicate that when teams consider working in extreme environments, they develop higher levels of teamwork as compared to teams expecting to work in non-extreme environments. These differences remain stable also during the deployment phase, such that teams operating in extreme environments will continue to have higher levels of teamwork as compared to teams operating in non-extreme environments.Originality/valueWith this study, the authors contribute to the teamwork quality research stream by empirically studying how teamwork quality develops in unique military contexts such as extreme environments. Studies in such contexts are relatively rare

Perceived analogical communication in design teams:Development and validation of a scale

Analogies have been shown to play a key role in design collaboration. However, research has been largely limited to the analogy itself and how it is used, overlooking the impact of analogy from the recipients' perspective. This is a critical aspect, considering the imperfect information transfer between members in design teams. We address this gap by developing a measure of perceived analogical communication in teams, focusing on the interpretation of the use of analogy in internal design team communications. We test the resulting scale across 3 samples, totalling 252 multi-disciplinary teams with 1182 team members. Results show that the scale is an internally consistent, distinct construct, and holds predictive validity for relevant design team processes and outcomes