Nowadays, it is increasingly necessary not only to develop good technical skills, but also communication and team work skills, which are not formally taught in engineering courses. Among these, the authors focused on the ability to work as a team, in laboratorial classes of a Bachelor course in biotechnology, and to know how to relate to others and work collaboratively, which are competences that have been increasingly appreciated by employers. Therefore, in the present paper the authors intend

more »

... to make an analysis of the self and peer-assessment of students, as members of a given group and to demonstrate some aspects of group dynamics in the chemical and biological area, to identify dysfunctional groups, and to establish the conditions to reduce them, and, lastly, to develop the critical thinking and working constructively in a team. The approach adopted employed the online tool SparkPlus, which presents a survey regarding teamworking skills to be answered by all team members. The data was obtained from laboratory group teams of students from the second year of Biotechnology Bachelor at polytechnic institute of Setúbal in Portugal for three academic years. Results identified students' larger difficulties: as writing the lab report; secondly the leadership problems, and thirdly the number crunching. These skills need to be developed in future work during the course. On the other hand, students registered less difficulties in efficient functioning of a group. Also, results from group dynamics, have identified over-rating and under-rating students in the assessment. These findings will allow actions to be taken in order to balance a given team, namely in terms of identification of the role of each member for a given task.