Effectiveness of Implementing Team Contracts in a Client-Sponsored Project-Based Learning Course

This Innovative-Practice Full Paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of the effectiveness of team contracts in a client-sponsored project-based learning course. A team contract is a collection of procedural rules, expectations, guidelines on team etiquette and task delegation, as well as penalties for violation that are mutually agreed upon by all members of a team working together to complete a project. Agreeing to adhere to an explicit set of expectations and rules at the beginning of the course has been found to reduce conflict, increase accountability, and provide a bench-mark for the obligations of every team member for effectively and efficiently completing a project. While we set down the framework of the contract, we encouraged every team to discuss the contract and its terms in detail amongst the members and make reasonable updates and amendments to any term if they deemed it necessary. The final amended version of the contract is signed by every team member as a sign of acknowledgment that they will adhere to the contract throughout the duration of the project. We implemented this team contract in a client-sponsored project-based data science course consisting of undergraduate, master's, and doctoral students. We collected feedback from the students on its effectiveness through a questionnaire that included questions requiring yes/no responses, responses on a Likert scale, and free-text responses. In general, the responses indicated a positive attitude and appreciation towards the usefulness of team contracts, especially in reducing social loafing, the explicit nature of the expectations, and in creating a professional working environment. We discuss how the implementation of the team contract has led to reduced conflicts, fewer complaints about non-contributing team members, increased engagement, a sense of ownership through the definition of rules and responsibilities, and a collectively enforced mechanism for the accountability of team members. Finally, we note how team contracts must be supplemented with other strategies, such as anonymized peer feedback and grading policies on individual contribution to teamwork, for more positive student learning outcomes in team-based learning courses.