Development of Problem Solving Skills Amongst Undergraduate Engineering Students through a Team-Game-Tournament Collaborative Learning Method

Abstract

Problem-solving ability through critical thinking is an important skill required by an engineering student. Through these skills, students are expected to solve a real-world problem and provide an optimized solution. Working as an individual and as a team member can help a student to achieve this. Small-sized group activities will give opportunities to every student for interactions, reflect upon and reply to the diverse responses from their peers and hence contributing to the individual as well as group learning. One such activity is a Team-Game-Tournament (TGT) which builds a cooperative learning environment to develop a competitive activity that can help students to engage in critical reasoning. The quasi experimentation is done with 23 students of T.Y.B. Tech in wireless communication course by the implementation of TGT activity in the classroom. The class is first divided into heterogeneous (home) teams where students of different ability to learn together (team game) through collaboration, discussion and help each other in learning. New homogenous teams are formed later where students of same ability compete with each other (tournament) by applying the knowledge they have learned through collaboration in home team. Students then return to their home groups and report their earned scores. Feedback survey reveals that 82% of students strongly agree that collaborative activity was engaging and motivating for critical thinking. Semi-structured student's interview reveals that classroom collaboration is superior to web collaboration. Points earned in the game and tournament phase measures the learning of every student. On comparing the median score of each team with the class median score it has been found that four teams have scored more than the median score of class indicating improved learning. There was 30% improvement in a number of students attempting numerical example in unit –II test after TGT activity.