Teams assessing teams: How assessment is affected by team member personality traits

In architectural and civil engineering design, effective team collaboration is critical to creating functional built environments. To prepare future engineers for careers involving collaboration, this research paired first-year engineering students with similar extraversion five-factor model scores in dyads to complete an introductory bridge design project. To understand the benefits of this type of pairing, 29 teams were tasked with designing and constructing popsicle stick bridges using data collected over several semesters. During the project, students completed a peer review activity in which one team attempted to build and subsequently generate feedback about another team's design. Every dyad had an opportunity to generate feedback for another design, as well as receive feedback about their design. The students completed pretest and post-test assessments to provide their perceptions about their own designs before and after this prototyping activity. The analysis focused on the dynamics of team agreement regarding perceptions of the design and documentation. The paper finds correlations of openness and agreeableness to shifts in perception of performance in the design. Correlations also were found related to these factors, as well as conscientiousness for perception shifts related to documentation tasks. The findings of this research generally align with related prior works and illustrate how team personality traits can be tied to the way that the same type of formative feedback can be received differently by students.