Improving Team Dynamics

Data Collection in Progress

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 collected data from 7 courses in Fall 2025 and another 20 courses in Spring 2026. Data collection will continue in the 2026-27 academic year.

Interested in learning more about this project? Contact Ishita Dey.

Papers in Progress

  • “Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Measuring the Effectiveness of Team Contracts in a Randomized Control Experiment” (Abstract)

Conference Presentations

  • Dey, Dowell, Eremionkhale, Ersoy, Hartman, McKee, Chiang, et al., “Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Measuring the Effectiveness of Team Contracts in a Randomized Control Experiment,” CTREE, May 2026.

  • Dey, Dowell, Eremionkhale, Ersoy, Hartman, McKee, Chiang, et al., “Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Measuring the Effectiveness of Team Contracts in a Randomized Control Experiment,” TeachECONference, June 2026.