Validity Assessment of the P-B-P Model across various Engineering Disciplines for Better Team Learning Results

Promoting and enhancing team learning is one of the essential tasks in improving the quality of education using the CDIO framework. The Pull-Balance-Push (P-B-P) model, which was first presented at the 10th Annual International CDIO Conference at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain (June 16 - 19, 2014), has been deployed at Duy Tan University in various CDIO projects at the senior level of different majors, including Software Engineering, Information Systems, Civil Engineering, and Electrical Engineering. The model is basically a set of approaches to bring about better team learning by improving students’ communication skills, learning capability and in-class participation as well as emphasizing the instructor’s role in guiding teamwork efforts. However, while the advantages of this model have become widely-appreciated by the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and its students, other faculties like Civil Engineering and Information Technology are still cautious in their adoption of the model, partly because of their own CDIO-project structures, which were designed and adopted a long time ago. In addition, to effectively carry out the P-B-P model, students and instructors would need to spend extra time and effort for reports, meetings and other documentation work, which raised concern about the already heavy workload during the final year. Through a series of in-person interviews and surveys, this paper will help analyze and benchmark the pros and cons of the P-B-P model across the four disciplines of Electrical Engineering, Software Engineering, Information Systems, and Civil Engineering in order to assess the validity and sustainability of this model under different learning settings.

Proceedings of the 12th International CDIO Conference, Turku, Finland, June 12-16 2016