Students are often apprehensive of group work in academic settings. Yet collaborating with others is key to deep, transformative learning and to professional work. For these reasons, collaborating effectively with others is widely championed as an essential learning outcome in undergraduate programs. Collaborating effectively requires both navigating interpersonal dynamics, cognitive dissonance, and accountability gaps (social complexity) and learning new content or skills (content complexity, task complexity). Team-Based Learning (TBL) offers a pedagogical architecture specifically designed to scaffold the development of skills students need to manage the complexity of collaborative learning and collaborative work.  

Little is known, however, about how students experience the features of TBL as tools to help them manage the complexity of collaboration. We investigated how students experience group work, TBL, and complexities of collaboration, surveying 305 students from undergraduate TBL-based classes about their views of collaborative learning and TBL at three points during the term:  start, mid-point, and end.  

Our results show,  

• at the start of term, fewer students (<23%) enjoyed group work 
• by mid-term and end of term, significantly more students (>41%, >45%) enjoyed TBL 
• students described using features explicitly built into TBL (e.g., intra-, inter-team discussion) and implicitly fostered by TBL (e.g., team decision-making) to successfully navigate complexities of collaborative learning 
• students sometimes experienced TBL as limited and described looking outside class for help with complex content 

We conclude that TBL allows students to build skills they need to navigate social, task, and content complexity, transforming dislike for group work into an enjoyment of productive complexity.  TBL fosters a learning environment that offers students supports they find helpful in navigating and leveraging complexity, but it falls short in providing students with diverse materials they may need to learn complex content; future studies could explore how to incorporate resources students seek outside class.