Teamwork in the Academic System; Identifying its Challenges in the Students' Academic Activities

Document Type : Scientific - Research

Author

Assistant Professor, Department of Educational Sciences, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, University of Malayer, Malayer, Iran

Abstract

Objective: Nowadays, teamwork in higher education institutions is considered one of the best strategies for the interaction and participation of students in the learning process as well as the development of their communication skills. While recognizing the benefits of teamwork can create a positive understanding among faculty members, and students, some factors can prevent the creation of teamwork and cause a low desire to work in a team in the academic system. These factors can also reduce its benefits and positive effects. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to identify the challenges related to teamwork among students.
Materials and Methods: To achieve this purpose, a qualitative approach by deductive qualitative survey method was used. A total of 142 students of educational sciences from Alzahra and Malayer Universities were included who had teamwork experience during academic life. Thus, the researcher selected 114 of them by purposive sampling from the type of criterion method and based on the criterion of having experience in teamwork. The research tool was an open-ended questionnaire based on teamwork theory which was designed in Google Form. The data were analyzed by the deductive content analysis method. To validate the findings, a peer-checking method was used.
Result and Discussion: Findings showed that teamwork challenges in the students' academic activities can be divided into eight main components and seventeen sub-components including adaptability challenge (non- adaptability with team rules and regulations, resistance to changes, lack of knowledge about each other, and resistance to team opinions), backup behavior challenge (lack of cooperation of team members in distributing work pressure, inappropriate distribution of work among team members), performance supervising challenge (disapproval of mutual supervision, acceptance the supervision of team just by leader, lack of existence of mutual supervision), team orientation challenge (priority of individual goals over team goals), team leadership challenges (incompetence of team leader, lack of existence a leader in team, disobedience of members from team leader), mutual trust challenge (lack of mutual trust between team members), shared mental models challenges (lack of shared understanding of team tasks), closed-loop communication challenge (lack of interaction and communication between team members, lack of exchange of information between team members). Based on the research findings, if we want to use teamwork in students’ academic activities, we require more participation of faculty members by developing instructions for doing teamwork, assessing students' readiness to do teamwork, and determining the exact objectives of teamwok.

Keywords

References

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