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Assessment of openness as a dynamic team skill in order to counteract "free-riding"

Group work is frequently used in higher education to prepare students for their future work roles and to foster the development of interpersonal and social skills. Such skills may be of particular importance when solving complex problems, in study situations as well as in real life. However, students often report on problems in group work and teachers face difficulties in making fair assessments of the individuals’ contribution. This paper emphasizes the development of openness as an essential team skill for enabling successful group work, to counteract free-riding, and to facilitate teachers in making fair assessments. With the use of a questionnaire for peer assessments of team skills, we measured openness in 23 groups from two different courses—one with students who know each other well and one with students who just met. In a comparison of the two student groups, we conclude that students with a history of working together exhibited more openness, thus speaking in favor of group work running over a longer period of time. We consider the operationalization of the concept openness as the main contribution here, in addition to the empirical result.