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Social sensitivity and classroom team projects: an empirical investigation

Published: 29 February 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Team work is the norm in major development projects and industry is continually striving to improve team effectiveness. Researchers have established that teams with high levels of social sensitivity tend to perform well when completing a variety of specific collaborative tasks. Social sensitivity is the personal ability to perceive, understand, and respect the feelings and viewpoints of others, and it is reliably measurable. However, the tasks in recent research have been primarily short term, requiring only hours to finish, whereas major project teams work together for longer durations and on complex tasks. Our claim is that, social sensitivity can be a key component in predicting the performance of teams that carry out major projects. Our goal is to determine if previous research, which was not focused on students or professionals in scientific or technical fields, is germane for people in computing disciplines. This paper reports the results from an empirical study that investigates whether social sensitivity is correlated with the performance of student teams on large semester-long projects. The overall result supports our claim that the team social sensitivity is highly correlated with successful team performance. It suggests, therefore, that educators in computer-related disciplines, as well as computer professionals in the workforce, should take the concept of social sensitivity seriously as an aid or obstacle to productivity.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '12: Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education
February 2012
734 pages
ISBN:9781450310987
DOI:10.1145/2157136
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 29 February 2012

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Author Tags

  1. collaboration
  2. computer science
  3. empirical study
  4. social sensitivity
  5. teams

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SIGCSE '12
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SIGCSE '12: The 43rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
February 29 - March 3, 2012
North Carolina, Raleigh, USA

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SIGCSE '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 100 of 289 submissions, 35%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

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  • (2022)A Decade of Demographics in Computing Education Research: A Critical Review of Trends in Collection, Reporting, and UseProceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3501385.3543967(323-343)Online publication date: 3-Aug-2022
  • (2021)Social sensitivity: a manifesto for CSCL researchInternational Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning10.1007/s11412-021-09344-8Online publication date: 25-May-2021
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