Using Educational Escape Room Activities to Teach Teamwork Skills and Build Effective Teams
Authors: Kelly John , Campbell Nicole 
Published: June 2021

Teamwork involves a set of skills used by a group of people who are working together towards a common goal. It is one of the most important skill sets for many careers; however, undergraduate students report that opportunities to develop teamwork skills are limited. Additionally, knowing the criteria that should be used to build effective teams of students can be challenging for instructors. In response to these problems, our aim was to develop and evaluate a low‐stakes team‐based activity that provides students with an opportunity to practice and develop teamwork skills. We also used the activity to investigate the criteria required to select effective student teams. To do this, we collaborated with a local escape room design team to develop a novel educational escape room activity (escape activity) that could be implemented in upper year science laboratory courses. Briefly, the activity requires students to work in teams and consists of various thematic challenges, such as visual and numerical puzzles. It requires collaboration amongst team members, each with their own strengths and perspectives, to solve a series of challenges and “break‐in” to the box within a limited amount of time.

Currently, a longitudinal study approved by our institutional review board is being completed in a fourth‐year undergraduate laboratory course, which requires students to work in teams throughout the semester on a research project. The escape activity was run during the first lab session and students were randomly placed in small groups. Following the activity, students completed a validated self‐efficacy of teamwork skills survey and reported on their past research experiences. The results of the surveys allowed us to build teams that had strengths in teamwork skills, research experience, or both. When building teams, we ensured that they all represented a diversity of skills so that no teams were disadvantaged. An additional survey on self and peer evaluations of teamwork behaviours will also be administered at the end of the semester to evaluate the effectiveness of these teams. This will be done using a t‐distribution test on the teams' scores. The results of these surveys could inform the criteria that are used to select effective student teams in the future. Individual and group‐based reflections completed after the activity and at the end of the semester will be analyzed to identify themes related to teamwork concepts that students learned and compared to surveys on past teamwork experiences. These will assess the students' development of teamwork skills and their perceptions of its importance throughout the semester, which could inform the effectiveness of the escape activity as a pedagogical tool to teach teamwork skills. The data is in the process of being collected and analyzed.

The escape activity is generalizable to any course or discipline. Thereby, validation of the escape activity as an effective pedagogical tool to teach teamwork skills could provide educators with an innovative opportunity to address the lack of opportunities for teamwork development in the undergraduate curriculum. It could also enhance students' self‐efficacy of teamwork skills which could provide educators with criteria to develop more effective student teams.

Support or Funding Information

Western CTL

This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.