Team Projects: Assessing the Individual Student Benefit - A conversation with Dr. Joanna DeFranco
Channel: Center for Online Innovation in Learning
Date: 2015-07-22

The complexity of engineering problems continues to increase thus emphasizing the need for collaboration among engineers. Accordingly, teamwork can be an essential part of the engineering curriculum; especially when a course objective needs to model complex real world problems. During this COIL Conversation, Dr. Joanna F. DeFranco, assistant professor of software engineering at Penn State Great Valley, discusses her research focused on peer tutoring within the context of student teams, including the road blocks to individual learning during team-oriented project-based learning and the impact of peer tutoring measured during implementation in an online software engineering course.

Teamwork can be beneficial to a student team as a whole as well as an individual on that team gaining real world experience. However, previous research, in a large scale experiment, provided no evidence that working on an effective team had a positive effect on individual student performance in learning course content. In her current work, Dr. DeFranco restructured an existing online software engineering course to integrate peer tutoring in an effort to facilitate individual learning on an effective project team.

Joanna F. DeFranco is an assistant professor of software engineering at Penn State Great Valley, earned her Ph.D. in computer and information science from New Jersey Institute of Technology, M.S. in computer engineering from Villanova University, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Math from Penn State University. She has worked as an Electronics Engineer for the Navy as well as a Software Engineer at Motorola. Dr. DeFranco has published two books, as well has numerous journal articles and conference proceedings.

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