Uncovering hidden demands of global learners: Mind and body in a PBL context

As the AEC industry becomes increasingly distributed we need to prepare students for this global workplace. However, little is still understood of the demands distributed collaboration puts on members of AEC teams. We need to create transparency about team members' states to understand and increase their engagement and through this performance. The aim of this study was to develop a novel framework, innovative analytic tools and indicators to Detect and Interpret global learners' mental and psycho-physiological states and Recommend constructive interventions to increase engagement and transparency in support of improved team members' performance, interaction experience, and wellbeing. This study is at the intersection of distributed work, technology mediated project based learning, cognition, and communication research. This research presents a new approach to detect engagement through indicators of the Mind and Body leveraging new sensor technologies to capture cognitive flexibility and psycho-physiological arousal, respectively. To achieve the objectives of this study a multi-modal methodology was developed to correlate the quantitative data of Mind and Body with qualitative data from surveying and observations. It interprets the engagement in the context of meeting activity and links it to team performance. Three generations of CEE222 - AEC Global Teamwork students from Stanford and university partners from the US and Europe were instrumented and observed during their 2hour weekly team meetings throughout their four-month project experience. This study provides a new framework to understand engagement from a cognitive and psycho-physiological perspective in the context of real-life meeting interaction. It creates a comprehensive database linking heartrate data and an in-depth video protocol analysis to questionnaire data and elucidates gaps in existing communication, cognition, and teamwork literature. This body of work presents a new understanding of qualitative and quantitative engagement in distributed project based teamwork, highlights different demands and arousals using new communication technologies, identifies a new cognitive phenomenon of engagement, and discusses a newly discovered intention pattern around speech.