Abstract
To prepare students for real-life software engineering projects, many higher-education institutions offer courses that simulate working life to varying degrees. As software engineering requires not only technical, but also inter- and intrapersonal skills, these skills should also be assessed. Assessing soft skills is challenging, especially when project-based and experiential learning are the primary pedagogical approaches. Previous work suggests that including students in the assessment process can yield a more complete picture of student performance. This paper presents experiences with developing and using a peer assessment framework that provides a 360-degree view on students' project performance. Our framework has been explicitly constructed to accommodate and evaluate tacit skills that are relevant in agile software development. The framework has been evaluated with 18 bachelors- and 11 masters-level capstone projects, totaling 176 students working in self-organized teams. We found that the framework eases teacher workload and allows a more thorough assessment of students' skills. We suggest including self- and peer assessment into software capstone projects alongside other, more traditional schemes like productivity metrics, and discuss challenges and opportunities in defining learning goals for tacit and social skills.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE) 2013 Proceedings |
Publisher | IEEE |
Publication date | Oct 2013 |
Pages | 1723-1729 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 978-1-4673-5261-1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Oct 2013 |
MoE publication type | A4 Article in conference proceedings |
Event | Frontiers in Education Conference - Oklahoma, United States Duration: 23 Oct 2013 → 26 Oct 2013 |
Fields of Science
- 113 Computer and information sciences
- peer assessment
- assessment metrics
- self-assessment
- case study
- capstone project
- experiential learning
- project-based learning
- tacit skills
- teamwork
- computer science education
- agile software engineering
- 516 Educational sciences