3.1 Students generally have a positive attitude to teamwork.
Of the 12 respondents, 10 reported positive attitudes (like 7; or love 3) to teamwork (Figure 5A). Positively, all students felt their teamwork experience in Plants and the Soil Environment (BIOS3015) was positive (ok 2; excellent 10; Figure 5B) and all students reported that their experience in this course was better than their previous experiences (Supplementary Material 6). The two respondents who mentioned that they dislike or hate teamwork both reported their experience in BIOS3015 was “Excellent” (Supplementary Material 5A).
In Plants and the Soil Environment (BIOS3015) none of the respondents reported conflict (Supplementary Material 5A) and when asked to explain, the majority of comments were about “worked well together” (IDs 1,4,8,9,11) or “got along well” (IDs 5, 10, 11). Some students made comments about how they maintained their positive relationships for example “All members equally divided the work and communicated effectively over WhatsApp group chat. By assigning different areas of research it allowed a bit of independent research as well, which helps in distance group work” (ID2) or “Nobody was particularly attached to their own ideas that they wouldn’t allow other ideas” (ID3). Where issues arose students reported overcoming them “There were slight issues due to distance and lack of communication, however these were soon sorted” (ID7) and “Everyone got along; there were minimal disagreements and those that did arise were quickly resolved” (ID10). A respondent who loves teamwork reported: “My team was amazing we helped each either with respect and without fights” (ID6).
When allowed an open box to discuss detriments of teamwork, every comment fitted well within the codes used in our previous paper (Rasmussen et al., 2011). Five respondents mentioned unequal workloads as a problem while 4 students made comments linked to unfair marks (Figure 5C). Similarly, 4 students commented that it can be harder to organise meetings or other logistical issues while only 2 students commented on either conflict or social issues (Figure 5C). Logistical concerns were around making time to meet (Supplementary Material 5B; ID4 and ID9) and bringing the final pieces together (ID2) while conflict (reconciling differences) and social issues were closely related with different work paces (ID7), accepting your ‘vision’ may not be the outcome (ID3) and personality clashes (ID8 and ID10).
When describing the benefits of teamwork, all bar one comment fitted well within our previous codes (Rasmussen et al., 2011). This comment was linked to communication as a benefit. Although unequal workload was the most mentioned detriment, shared workload was also one of the most mentioned benefit of teamwork (Figure 5D). Benefits to learning were also mentioned and included comments about everyone having different skills and background knowledge. Two comments were made about social benefits and for each of ‘Enjoyable’, ‘marks’, ‘employability’ and ‘communications’ there was one response. On inspecting the comments that fall in the Learning and Shared workload categories, there are many similarities (Supplementary Material 5B). For example, several students refer to pooling ideas, strengths or skills (IDs 1,2,4,6,7,8,12). As mentioned by respondent ID10 “The end result is often ”greater than the sum of its parts”, less work has to be done overall, for a bigger result”.