Teaching Collaboration Skills to Undergraduate Biochemistry and Chemistry Students

Abstract

We want our students to develop effective collaboration skills, but how do we intentionally teach teamwork and assess it? The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at St. Mary’s College of Maryland has scaffolded collaboration skills throughout the curriculum for the chemistry and biochemistry programs at three levels, foundational, developing, and capstone. The skills are tied to signature assignments at each level. In Biochemistry I and II, we are using a team contract at the beginning of semester‐long team projects (a bioinformatics project and a grant proposal project) where students identify their strengths, review expectations, and make plans for group communication. At the end of the semester, each student assesses their own contributions and those of their team members for various parts of the project. In addition, this academic year we started using a common collaboration rubric in multiple courses for students to evaluate self and team members using the following subcategories: quality of work, commitment, leadership, communication, and analysis. In Biochemistry I and II, we used this rubric for multiple assignments that are part of the semester long projects. In the General Chemistry lab, we modified this rubric to fit into a form that reflects these same collaboration attributes after each lab experience, so students can assess and report privately on their experiences as part of their collaboration grade for the course. A similar collaboration rubric is completed by students for each of five team‐based laboratories in Physical Chemistry I, enabling us to obtain honest feedback and assign a collaboration grade. We will discuss how the use of these forms has affected collaborative projects in our courses.