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”.