Improving Team Dynamics

Recruiting and Implementation

Overview

The Improving Team Dynamics project is our first randomized experiment, and it aims evaluate the impact of having student groups create and commit to team contracts. These contracts force students to decide and document how they will communicate, divide up work, and resolve potential conflicts before starting their course-specific group work. We will look for effects of the treatment on students’ attitudes towards teamwork, individual teamwork skills, team dynamics, and sense of classroom community.

The existing empirical evidence on the effectiveness of teamwork on student outcomes is mixed. This may stem in part from differences in how teams function across contexts. Without intentional support, team-based assignments can suffer from free-riding, unclear roles, or poor communication—conditions that reduce the potential benefits of cooperative learning. The existing literature on team contracts (Pertegal-Felices et al., 2019; Dougherty et al., 2018; Brannen et al., 2021) suggests positive effects such as reduced conflict rates and anxiety, and improved group cohesion, motivation, responsibility, and communication. However, as pointed out by Chau et al. (2025), there are two main shortcomings in this research: small sample size and a lack of comparable control groups. Our project addresses both of these shortcomings by conducting a large-scale randomized experiment.

This project has just started data collection for Fall 2025–If you are teaching a course with group work this Fall and might be interested in participating, learn more here. Data will also be collected in Spring 2026.