Personal and organizational factors that enhance or constrain faculty implementation of team activities in their classes

New accreditation standards from the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology strongly recommend engineering schools add project-based team learning to the engineering curriculum to prepare students to work on multi-disciplinary project teams. Consequently, engineering administrators are currently facing the challenge of encouraging faculty to use teaching methods that incorporate team activities. One purpose of this study, therefore, is to provide administrators who wish to encourage faculty to use team-based teaching methods with information about what enhances or constrains faculty members' willingness and ability to implement team activities in their classes. Another purpose is to develop grounded theory about why faculty do---or do not---change their teaching methods.; Grounded theory was selected as the primary approach to investigate this issue because previous research has not identified the factors involved in faculty members' decisions to change teaching methods, and few theories are available to explain the teaching behaviors of research university professors. The grounded theory approach follows systematic procedures to inductively develop a theory grounded in the data surrounding a phenomenon. The result is a set of hypotheses or propositions that may be tested with a different or larger population. A survey questionnaire was selected as the second approach in this study to see if what was learned from the grounded theory study held true for a larger population of engineering professors.; Four theoretical constructs---Previous Experience, Time Constraints, Resource Accessibility, and Employment Security---emerged from the qualitative data and became the focus of multiple logistic regression analyses of the responses from the survey. The results from the analyses confirmed that Previous Experience with team activities, whether successful or unsuccessful, Previous Training on team activities, and Time Constraints were all significantly related to the use of team activities by these research university professors. Resource Accessibility and Employment Security were not significantly related to the use of team activities in this study.