DEVELOPMENT AND PSYCHOMETRIC EVALUATION OF THE GEOSCIENCE TEAMWORK ASSESSMENT INSTRUMENT

Teamwork is an important skill for students’ learning and workforce development in the geosciences. However, valid and reliable instruments that assess students’ teamwork skills development in the geosciences continues to be a challenge for researchers and educators. In this presentation, we will report on the development and validation of the Geoscience Teamwork Assessment (GTA) instrument. The instrument was developed through three stages: review and selection of items to create the initial GTA, use of expert reviews to refine the instrument, and the development and psychometric evaluation of the final 20-item GTA. Psychometric evaluation, which consisted of examining internal structure validity and internal consistency, was conducted through a national survey that recruited 122 geoscience and environmental science majors throughout the United States. Internal structure was examined through Exploratory Factor Analysis using Principal components extraction with varimax rotation, a MAP test, and parallel analysis. Internal consistency was assessed using McDonald’s omega (ω). After deleting one item, three factors were extracted from 19 items, explaining 53.61% of the variance. These factors consist of Interpersonal and Ethics Skills (11 items; ω = 0.88), Team Transition Skills (4 items; ω = .80), and Action Skills (4 items; ω = .69). The psychometric evaluation of the GTA yielded a structure that is consistent with the IPO model of teamwork skills taxonomy by Marks et al. (2001) and the essential teamwork skills required by employers (Nyarko & Petcovic, 2023a). The present work addresses a need for adequate measurement of teamwork development in geoscience education research (Nyarko & Petcovic, 2023a; 2023b) and helps mitigate a dearth of geoscience measures within STEM education research (see Maric et al., 2023). The GTA has implications for assessing both teamwork learning and education research outcomes withing the geoscience classroom, laboratory, and field.