A collaborative model of engineering education for complex global environments

Although team-based projects have become a popular practice in colleges with focus on helping students learn subjects collaboratively and effectively, the current education paradigm mainly adopts ad hoc collaboration practices. There lacks a quantitative methodology for enabling appropriate and scientific approaches to guide the educational community in teaching and transforming educational practices to support the development, implementation, and improvement of state-of-the-art collaborative-learning practices on campuses. This paper presents a new computational model and framework to quantitatively explore the collaboration-based behavioral dynamics of student teams and its impact on team performance. More specifically, a suite of mathematical models in the form of computations, structural equation modeling, and principal component analysis are created to describe and analyze a variety of learning circumstances, aimed at generating rules of thumb to guide student teams to retune collaborative practices in a proactive and realtime manner for improved performance.