Students’ structured conceptualizations of teamwork in multidisciplinary student teams using concept maps

The design of effective teamwork teaching and learning for multidisciplinary student teams is subject to debate both in research as well as in practice. As researchers and educators, we need to understand the context in which students learn by understanding their experiences and their own conceptualizations of teamwork in multidisciplinary student teams, because that is the frame of reference in which they operate. Using a concept mapping method we aggregated student concept maps of their own teamwork, to understand student conceptualizations of teamwork. The results show that students identify four distinct clusters, the ‘interaction’ cluster, the ‘trust’ cluster, the ‘conflict/divergence’ cluster and the ‘innovation’ cluster. These clusters are strongly connected within themselves, but very weakly connected between clusters. What may be gathered from this is that students see four distinct aspects of teamwork, that have their own inner dynamics, but that is less clear to them how these different clusters influence or mediate each other.