THE EFFECT OF GROUP DIVERSITY ON TEAM AND STUDENT PERFORMANCE

Group work and collaborative activities improve social skills, such as communication and leadership, which are sought after in the workplace. Our paper explores the effects of teamwork on student performance in an undergraduate applied statistics course. Particularly, we examine the compositional effects of a group on both team and individual student performance. We find that groups with more females generally perform better, while individual students benefit more from working with a racially-diverse group. In addition, assuming that peer evaluations can accurately measure social skills, we posit that students who are better team players receive higher course grades. Our findings support research on the complementarity between social and cognitive skills where more socially-skilled students benefit more under a collaborative environment.