Assessing the individual acquisition of teamwork competence by exploring students’ instant messaging tools use: the WhatsApp case study

Abstract

Nowadays, working in groups is very usual and popular in most professional environments. Thus, students, as potential workers, need to acquire teamwork competence in their educational institutions. However, when the students are working in groups, it is easy assessing their final result but not so much evaluating how each of them, individually, is developing teamwork competence. In this sense, there are several methodologies, and those with better results are the ones that explore students’ interactions in learning platforms when developing the activity/project. Taking into account the latter, students’ interactions do not only happen in a learning platform but also using other tools such as instant messaging tools. This paper explores the possibility to assess the use of instant messaging tools for the acquisition of teamwork competence, and specifically, it presents a case study about the use of WhatsApp. From the results, we can conclude that the students prefer to use instant messaging tools in teamwork activities than other interaction tools as forums; and that the employment of those tools has a positive impact in students’ grades.