An Empirical Study on the Use of Student-Focused Approaches in the Software Engineering Teaching

Abstract

The software industry is not satisfied with the preparation level of newly graduated professionals in Computing undergraduate courses. There is a predominance of traditional approaches to the Software Engineering (SE) teaching which proved to be inefficient, because they focus on the content from the professor´s viewpoint. This research aims to investigate if the use of student-focused approaches in the SE teaching can develop more technical competencies to apply in industry than when traditional approaches are applied. For this, an iterative model has been defined to integrate the main student-focused approaches and a controlled experiment was carried out in four undergraduate courses. The data were collected from structured interviews with students and analyzed using ANOVA. The results showed no significant statistical difference between student-focused and traditional teaching approaches in the development of SE competencies. However, these results were impacted by the motivation and commitment of the experiment students.

Keywords

• student-focused approaches
• software engineering teaching
• competencies development