What Do Undergraduates Perceive About Teamwork?

Abstract

[EN] According to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), training programs should be built on on a set of competences that could lead to higher employability and transferability. Among these competences, teamwork is shown to be a highly desirable skill by employers, but not always achieved by graduates. It is suggested that students learn more from good team experiences than they do from bad experiences. The work presented herein is focused on students’ perception of teamwork, since by identifying their perceptions we would be able to build positive students’ experiences in teamwork. The aim of this paper is to establish a catalogue of students’ perceptions about teamwork to help faculty members in the identification and analysis of their students’ perceptions. In order to obtain students’ perceptions, open coding is used. Students’ perceptions are drawn from their answers from an open-ended survey that were processed by using the professional software tool Atlas.TI. Eighty-seven third year students participated in this study. The evolution of students’ perceptions along an academic year was analyzed. Perceptions of teamwork were measured at both the beginning and end of the academic year in two groups of students. Since teamwork activities of the two groups were different, the relevance of the relation between perceptions and activity’s nature has been also considered.