Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Measuring the Effectiveness of Team Contracts in a Randomized Control Experiment

Teamwork is a critical skill in the workforce and is often the most despised aspect of classroom instruction by students. Team contracts require students to decide and document how they will communicate, divide work, and resolve potential conflicts before beginning their course-specific group work. We examine the effects of team contracts on students’ attitudes towards teamwork, individual teamwork skills, team dynamics, and their sense of classroom community using a large scale randomized experiment administered through the Economic Education Network for Experiments (EENE). Our preliminary results indicate that participating in a team contract has a small, positive impact on three out of our four outcomes, but the coefficients are currently indistinguishable from 0.