Team Harmony before, during, and after COVID-19

Teamwork is integral to any computer science curriculum because it provides students with experiences that mirror the industry. Some students are resistant to working in teams because of the perceived inequities. Assessing individual participation and team dynamics can provide faculty with valuable information to design and deploy interventions to improve students’ teamwork skills and help dysfunctional teams. This work looks at the team harmony experience of pairs in a large (300 person) third-year Software Engineering class in a North American research-intensive university. For the last seven semesters, we asked students to regularly report their sense of equity relating to their contributions to group discussions, influence over task assignments, and overall contributions to their course project development. Based on our analyses, four periods emerged: prior to COVID-19, during the transitional period as restrictions were applied due to the pandemic, during COVID-19, and after the acute COVID-19 period ended and restrictions were lifted. Overall, we saw that students experienced a decrease in team harmony during the transition to lockdown and that harmony recovered in subsequent semesters, with some measures gradually trending worse over time in the post-pandemic period (once the restrictions were lifted).