Strategies for dealing with slacker and underperforming teammates in class projects

Although team projects are increasingly common in the engineering curriculum, faculty and students often lack effective strategies for handling problems that arise on these projects. This paper attempts to discover effective practices for handling “slacker” teammates - one of the most common problems reported on student teams - by completing discourse completion interviews with professionals, faculty, and students. Participants were given written scenarios and asked to comment on the pros and cons of different responses and specify what they thought was the ideal response. Professionals' responses often differed from those of students and faculty, suggesting particular areas in which teamwork training is needed. Specifically, students need to be coached to avoid the temptation to simply do slackers' work for them and to instead provide constructive, non-accusatory criticism grounded in clear criteria and focused on future steps. We also found that professionals used the team infrastructure to solve problems by assigning earlier deadlines, breaking the project into smaller chunks, reassigning responsibilities and confirming team members' buy-in for tasks and criteria. We end by recommending that team members be prompted at the end of the project to describe what steps they took to motivate and coach under-performing teammates.