<div><b>Background: </b>Purdue Polytechnic’s Tech12000, Design Thinking in Technology, course incorporates many instances of team work. Over the last 8 years, there have been varied methods of how to create the teams for the projects.</div><div><br></div><div><b>Purpose: </b>This study compares two methods of team formation, software generated and instructor/student-selected, to determine which, if any, method generates increased perception of team member satisfaction and increased team member contribution.</div><div><br></div><div><b>Methodology: </b>The subjects for this study were students enrolled in a design course at a Purdue Polytechnic, divided into a comparison group with instructor/student-selected teams, and a treatment group with software-generated teams. These students were predominately first year students enrolled in their first semester of college.</div><div><b><br></b></div><div><b>Findings/conclusions: </b>The researcher discovered that the computer software-generated teams produced teams that had slightly larger mean scores on satisfaction and contribution versus the instructor/student-selected teams, although not at a statistically significant level.</div><div><br></div><div><b>Implications:</b> The findings of this study provide another tool for educators, with possible implications for industry, to generate teams in the classroom.</div>

CATME (Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness) is a web-based platform that is intended to improve team experiences for students and faculty in higher education. The goal of this study is to redesign the user interface for CATME employing User-centered Design (UCD) framework. The design process consists of four phases: discover, define, develop, and validate. This study examines the current website to discover potential usability problems by conducting different methodology. Then it moves into robust user research to define the user’s pain points need to be addressed to improve user experience. In order to tackle the usability issues, design solutions are created and evaluated with real users. The result of the study is redesigned UI (user interface) for CATME’s three key pages, the homepage, activity wizard, and data dashboard.

<p>he use of student-centered instructional strategies is a common practice in engineering classes. However, understanding which instructional strategies have a more profound effect on students’ performance and motivation is fundamental in course design. Such comparisons would allow instructors to design and plan their courses with better learning activities, which could lead to better student engagement and learning. In this three-paper dissertation, I explored the relative effectiveness of two instructional strategies 1) reflective thinking, and 2) teamwork participation by primarily using quantitative methods. Self-regulated learning theory and the Interactive-Constructive-Active-Passive (ICAP) framework guided the selection of these two strategies.</p><p>The first study investigated the relationship of an instructional strategy and a motivational construct through the following research questions: 1) Do students with high academic self-efficacy generate high-quality reflections? 2) To what degree do students’ self-efficacy beliefs and reflection quality scores predict their learning outcomes? Bivariate Pearson product-moment correlation and multiple linear regression were used to analyze the relationships.</p><p>In the second study, I focused on studying the relative effectiveness of two instructional strategies on a motivational construct in a larger engineering class. More specifically, the second study focused on understanding change in students’ participation in two instructional strategies (i.e., reflective thinking and teamwork) and students’ achievement goals. Further, the study investigated the unique contribution of instructional strategies on students’ academic performance and changes in achievement goals. I used stepwise hierarchical regression, simultaneous regression, and repeated measures ANOVA to analyze the data.</p><p></p><p>The third study focused on investigating the role of the same two instructional strategies on students’ academic performance and multiple motivational constructs (i.e., self-efficacy, task value, and engagement). I used structural equation modeling, and repeated measures ANOVA to analyze the data.</p>