Importance of Collective Intelligence to Teamwork Performance on Computing Projects

Background:

In the early 1900s, psychologists developed IQ tests as an objective measure of human individual intelligence. Now there are preliminary results, as well as ongoing research, on measuring the intelligence of a group or team of people, and this group intelligence is referred to as collective intelligence.

Just as for an individual, there apparently is a single statistical factor that measures collective intelligence to predict how well the group will do on a range of tasks. One of the early findings was that the average intelligence of the group members correlated with the group’s collective intelligence to some extent.

Three factors were found to be more significant in correlating with collective intelligence:

Upon further analysis, the most important of these factors was determined to be social perceptiveness, and this factor appears to be the underlying cause of the other two factors.

See attached book chapter.

Collective Intelligence to Teamwork Performance on Computing Projects

Project:

The goal of this project is to analyze the makeup and the performance of the course project teams over the last several semesters to determine whether or not certain aspects of the team makeup yielded greater team performance.

Questions to be examined, for example, include:
  1. Do teams consisting of more women perform better than teams consisting of more men?
  2. Do teams with women team leaders perform better than teams with men team leaders?
  3. Do teams that meet for discussion frequently, likely indicating greater social perceptiveness, perform better than teams meeting less frequently?

Measures of statistical significance will be used to determine the degree to which a particular team makeup resulted in better team performance. Team performance will be measured by the end-of-semester team project grade as provided by the course instructors.