The work-reflection-learning cycle - Department of Computer and ...

team members and the co-constructive effort of making a shared timeline results in a ‘return
to experience’ richer than would have been possible for an individual, reflecting team
member alone. Feelings are attended to in the drawing of satisfaction curves. Experience is
re-evaluated through the revisiting of issues in the different workshop tasks, particularly the
last ones. Further, the students deemed the workshop approach useful for later projects.
Turning from student’s learning to organizational learning, three findings address the
potential for course staff to use the workshops to learn about the course:
First, students’ discussions provide insights about the effect of the course design. I.e.,
the example from team Q in Section 4.3 points to different stakeholders having
different project objectives [11]. Magda primarily wants to use the project to improve
her technical skills, while the formal course objective is to have students get experience
with project work for a customer, with a focus on the organization of teamwork and
management of stakeholder relationships. Such insights on students’ objectives and
motivation may be used to better align course objectives and actual learning outcome,
e.g. by presenting the course differently or changing incentives or course requirements.
Second, in our data, no patterns can be found relating curve sets to project grades.
While data from a much larger number of teams might have revealed some significant
correlation, a team’s curve set cannot be a diagnostic tool in project evaluation. The
curves reveal only part of a complex reality. Our curve sets may however be seen as
disproving possible preconceptions about successful collaboration. For instance, a
project receiving an A might have discrepant (Figure 1) or largely congruent curves
(another team in our data). Rich information is needed to understand the connection
between experience curves and project result, e.g. why discrepancies might represent
‘fruitful dynamics’ rather than subversive conflicts (cf. Section 4.4).
Third, it is possible to find patterns relating satisfaction curves to elements of the course
design. These patterns can be interpreted in light of students’ explanations of their curves. We
found two patterns in our data: a) Many students account for what can be denoted ‘report
dips’: down-periods before report deliveries, associated with stress and comments like
‘writing report is simply boring’. b) Feedback from the supervisor (e.g. report versions)
has great impact on the team members’ experience. For instance, one of our
supervisors, known to be ‘strict’, had been giving feedback making students in several
teams very disappointed and even demotivated for some time. This did however not
correlate with a negative grade. Patterns thus relating course events to individual
experience – whether revealing surprising connections or providing empirical evidence of
prior assumptions - can be used as a resource for improvements to the course design.
We see a potential for course staff to gain insights about the course from the workshops,
but students’ reflection and learning might suffer if an additional agenda is introduced.
Recommendation 1: If the workshop is used to learn about the course, agree with students that
data will be anonymous and used for improvement of next year’s course. Recommendation 2:
Make sure, and make students aware, that the workshop facilitator is not grading the project.
5.1 Suitability of the proposed workshop structure
Observations indicate that the workshop tasks were easily understood and willingly
performed. There were few questions, seemingly no misunderstandings and no apparent
reluctance to draw and explain curves on the whiteboard. All turns were explained and
linked to events, and the presenter was rarely interrupted. Explanations were generally
given in a straightforward way, and the audience seemed sensitive to the information.
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