Do Young People Really Know How to Collaborate for Common Success? Study on Undergraduate Students’ Perception of Collaborative Work in a Spanish University

Abstract

This paper studies undergraduate student attitudes towards team-based projects, connecting those attitudes to challenges and overall perception of this work. This study was conducted with 220 students in the context of three subjects taught at a Spanish University, that included collaborative projects as mandatory assignments to be developed over the course of the subject. The instrument was a Likert scale-based questionnaire. As a methodology, the Rasch model was used, making it possible to apply indirect measuring of students’ development level of various skills. The findings point to the difficulty in solving specific communication needs and managing students’ involvement and commitment to the project. The results obtained through Differential Item Functioning analysis (DIF) show that gender, year of study, students’ age, academic degrees, and the context of curricular subjects influence significantly the acquisition of skills related to collaborative work, facilitating or hindering their development among university students. These results have practical implications for the design of collaborative projects within higher education academic programs. They also suggest that the way collaborative work is usually planned is not very effective and should be reconsidered.

Addressing Potential Conflict among University Students during Collaborative Tasks

“…The study of [44] also confirmed that the lack of clear guidelines and expectations during collaborative tasks among undergraduate students is a problem. This is also supported by the argument of [45] that the way collaborative work is usually planned is not very effective among university students. Therefore, no implementation of clear guidelines promotes conflicts and establishes a foundation for ineffective collaboration, disintegrating team members against working towards shared objectives.…”