Learning to collaborate by collaborating: a face-to-face collaborative activity for measuring and learning basics about teamwork

Abstract

In today's fast-changing business environment, teams have emerged as a requirement for business success. However, in schools and universities, students are usually not taught teamwork skills. In this paper, we introduce learning to collaborate by collaborating, a process that enables collaboration and teamwork skills to be taught and measured through face-to-face collaborative work and class-wide activities supported by wirelessly connected hand-held devices. Following a description of learning to collaborate by collaborating, we present an experimental study whose results demonstrate that participants in the process displayed improved teamwork performance. We conclude that it is possible to effectively teach collaboration skills through the use of immediate feedback provided by a supporting technology.