What I'm Working On: Learning How People Learn in Teams

Posted by Anthony Hood

Much of my research and teaching involves improving how students and employees learn in team environments. I first became interested in this area out of frustration with the way my students often divide the responsibilities for team assignments. Maybe you too have been guilty of the following: 

An activity is to be completed by 4 students working cooperatively as a team. The activity is designed to facilitate learning in 4 distinct domains. However, under direct examination regarding one of the learning domains, a team member replies “I’m not sure. I wasn’t responsible for that part of the assignment.” After a few more questions directed at the other members, the team’s learning strategy becomes clear; each member focused their learning on only one domain and skimmed or ignored altogether the other three domains. 

With this learning strategy, the team as a whole learns 100% of the material, while individually each student only learns 25% of the material. Unfortunately, my exams are not team-based and students employing the “divide and conquer” learning strategy typically do not fare well individually on my exams.  :-)

However, the literature on team science suggests a paradox. Although we discourage students from employing this type of distributed learning strategy, our expectations may be at odds with the way we work and learn in today’s resource constrained environments. Distributed team structures often represent the most efficient way to get more done with limited amounts of time, attention and energy. Distributed learning is the way many of us in interdisciplinary groups manage projects, build labs, submit grants and publish papers. As an organizational psychologist and team scientist in the Collat School of Business at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), my job is to improve our understanding of team learning and help prepare students accordingly. 

Do you work and/or learn in teams? If so, does everyone on your team maintain responsibility for only certain areas or is everyone responsible for all areas?