Response to “Team Training for Team Science: Improving Interdisciplinary Collaboration”
Maura Borrego, Department of Engineering Education, Virginia Tech, mborrego@vt.edu
To complement this paper I’d like to help attendees and the committee members think about
how training research from work settings may translate to the ways we train junior scientists and
engineers at the graduate and undergraduate level. The two primary settings I will discuss are
laboratories/research groups and coursework. First, I will give a brief summary of what learning
outcomes may be the focus of interdisciplinary training and education. At the end, I will point to some
institutional barriers specific to interdisciplinary graduate education.
Learning Outcomes, Learning Objectives, Goals, etc.
What are teamwork skills? What does it mean for a researcher to be interdisciplinary,
multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary? These are ongoing debates, but I want to offer some specific
examples from synthesis of educational practice.
First, I want to note that “interdisciplinarity” and similar terms are largely an artifact of how
higher education institutions are organized. Unless students are pursuing a career in academia, touting
interdisciplinary skills may not resonate with employers. The industrial and organizational psychology
literature is rarely framed as cross-disciplinary because in industrial (and nonprofit or government)
settings, working across organizations does not mean working across disciplines. So although crossdisciplinary team training is important, it may appear to be undervalued in the workplace.
In an analysis of 130 funded proposals from the National Science Foundation’s Integrative
Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program (Borrego & Newswander, 2010), we
found that science and engineering PIs described interdisciplinary goals for their graduate students
along four themes:
1. Grounding in Multiple Traditional Disciplines
2. Integration Skills and Broad Perspective of the Interdisciplinary Domain
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3. Teamwork
4. Interdisciplinary Communication
This analysis was compared to definitions and frameworks from interdisciplinary scholars in the
humanities, and we found two important differences. First, it helped us realize that many scientists and
engineers make the implicit assumption that interdisciplinarity means teamwork among researchers
representing various disciplines. Second, we realized that scientists and engineers are not taking time to
reflect on the contribution, challenges or limitations of interdisciplinary and disciplinary research
approaches (at least not within the context of their research and graduate training processes)—
something which is emphasized in humanities discussions of interdisciplinary skills.
In another analysis of 104 articles describing engineering student team projects (primarily
undergraduate)(Borrego, Karlin, McNair, & Beddoes, in press 2013), we found that faculty members
used team projects to help students learn: teamwork, design, communication skills, innovation, life-long
learning or self-directed learning, and ethics. Within the broad category of teamwork, specific related
outcomes were global/cultural competence, project management, interdisciplinary teamwork,
distributed teamwork, leadership, and time management.
In particular, I want to point to cultural competence as an area of research that may particularly
informative to team science and team training. Disciplines have been likened to cultures (Reich & Reich,
2006), and research in cultural competence has developed a means for being sensitive to cultural
differences and developing communication and collaboration skills for developing common ground with
new team members, clients, etc.
Laboratory and Research Group Training
For doctoral students in science and engineering, most of their research training occurs during
the dissertation phase in a “research group” or “lab” setting. Most of the studies of how students,
postdocs and faculty members interact and learn in this setting are ethnographic, focusing in depth on
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one or a few settings. For example, Kevin Dunbar’s work has highlighted insights that interdisciplinary
researchers offer each other during formal and informal group meetings through the use of analogies
(Dunbar, 1999).
Few studies use surveys or other methods to understand research training experiences of
science and engineering doctoral students. Erin Crede and I used a survey methodology to understand
how engineering graduate students in various sized research groups interact with peers and advisors to
learn to conduct research (Crede & Borrego, 2012). An IGERT program evaluation reports 66% of IGERT
trainees worked on a team research project, although it is not clear whether this was within a course,
lab rotation or other research experience (Carney, Chawla, Wiley, & Young, 2006).
For any group to be a team, they must be interdependent and working toward a mutual goal.
These and other descriptions of research groups suggest that students are often interdependent in the
sharing of equipment, facilities and supplies. They have a common broad goal which is the research
theme of the group. However, the individualized nature of the PhD is a substantial barrier to developing
team-based dissertation research (Boden, Borrego, & Newswander, 2011), because we do not have a
widely accepted method for evaluating the individual contribution to a team project.
Coursework
Coursework is another means of training students at the graduate and undergraduate level in
interdisciplinary teamwork. For example, 80% percent of successful IGERT proposals described
coursework, such as creating new interdisciplinary graduate courses (Borrego & Cutler, 2010). Among
the proposals providing details of how they would develop team skills in students, 50% described new
courses, which typically included team projects.
In our analysis of 104 articles describing engineering team projects (primarily undergraduate),
we identified challenges most often cited and summarized the relevant literature from industrial and
organizational psychology (Borrego, Karlin, et al., in press 2013). The most prominent challenge was the
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issue of social loafing, described by some of the authors as “free-riders,” or team members who do not
contribute their fair share to the project. Conflict was also discussed more broadly. Engineering faculty
wanted student team projects to proceed smoothly and efficiently. Their efforts were frequently
directed at ensuring students manage their time, work together well, and each contribute their fair
share of effort. In the psychology literature, this is referred to as team effectiveness, or the study of
factors that influence a wide variety of team outcomes. This review article uses the challenges cited by
these faculty members to motivate a summary of five constructs influencing team effectiveness, with an
emphasis on implications on designing, facilitating and assessing team projects. The constructs1 are:
social loafing, interdependence, conflict, trust, and shared mental models.
Institutional Barriers and Changes
Finally, I would like to point to a forthcoming book chapter which discusses how a particular
funding initiative has resulted in changes at educational institutions to support interdisciplinary team
science (Borrego, Boden, et al., in press 2013). We interviewed administrators, faculty members and
students at institutions with at least 4 NSF IGERT grants. The faculty members described the barriers to
cross-disciplinary collaboration they encountered and how they eventually worked together across
different projects in different interdisciplinary domains to remove these barriers. For example, both
institutions recently made changes to graduate student advisor eligibility criteria; previously, only
faculty in the same department could be primary advisor. Other policies that had been changed include:
giving faculty credit for co-advising in other departments, allowing co-authored dissertation chapters,
and broadening fellowship criteria to include students in interdisciplinary programs or topic areas. These
multimillion-dollar grants raised the profile of interdisciplinary work on campus (the program began in
1998, and many described this as the first major interdisciplinary research grant at the institution) and
helped legitimize it. PIs found themselves as leaders and advocates on campus; several reported being
1
Technically, these are constructs, inputs and emergent states
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asked to serve on university-level groups to advise the president or provost, while others moved into
administrative positions after running an IGERT interdisciplinary training program. Finally, PIs reported
how promotion, tenure and faculty hiring had changed since the first IGERT grants were awarded.
Tenure committees became more accepting of interdisciplinary collaboration. IGERT success directly or
indirectly resulted in more hiring lines for interdisciplinary faculty members. PIs helped develop hiring
and support structures to ensure the success of new interdisciplinary faculty members.
References
Boden, D., Borrego, M., & Newswander, L.K. (2011). Student socialization in interdisciplinary doctoral
education. Higher Education, 62(6), 741-755.
Borrego, M., Boden, D., Pietrocola, D., Stoel, C.F., Boone, R., & Ramasubramanian, M.K. (in press 2013).
Lasting change at institutions with U.S. National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate
Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) funding for interdisciplinary graduate programs. In
S. Crowley, S. Eigenbrode, M. O’Rourke & J. D. Wulfhorst (Eds.), Enhancing Communication and
Collaboration in Interdisciplinary Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Borrego, M., & Cutler, S. (2010). Constructive alignment of interdisciplinary graduate curriculum in
engineering and science: An analysis of successful IGERT proposals. Journal of Engineering
Education, 99(4), 355-369.
Borrego, M., Karlin, J., McNair, L.D., & Beddoes, K. (in press 2013). Team effectiveness theory from
industrial and organizational psychology applied to engineering student project teams—A
review. Journal of Engineering Education, 102(3).
Borrego, M., & Newswander, L.K. (2010). Definitions of interdisciplinary research: Toward graduate-level
interdisciplinary learning outcomes. The Review of Higher Education, 34(1), 61-84.
Carney, J., Chawla, D., Wiley, A., & Young, D. (2006). Evaluation of the initial impacts of the national
science foundation's integrative graduate education and research traineeship program.
Bethesda, MD: Abt Associates, Inc.
Crede, E., & Borrego, M. (2012). Learning in graduate engineering research groups of various sizes.
Journal of Engineering Education, 101(3), 565-589.
Dunbar, K. (1999). The scientist in vivo : How scientists think and reason in the laboratory. In L. Magnani,
N. Nersessian & P. Thagard (Eds.), Model-Based Reasoning in Scientific Discovery (pp. 89–98):
Plenum Press.
Reich, S.M., & Reich, J.A. (2006). Cultural competence in interdisciplinary collaborations: A method for
respecting diversity in research partnerships. American Journal of Community Psychology, 38(12), 51-62.
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