(1157) RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN VARIATIONS OF PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS AND EDUCATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS ON SOFTWARE INTENSIVE SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT

摘要

In order to improve the training of IT professionals, practical courses in the form of project-basedlearning (PBL), which teach practical skills for systems acquisition and provisioning and for projectmanagement, are being implemented in various universities. For example, a course has been offeredat Waseda University since 2011 in cooperation with the Japanese governmental bodies and ITcompanies. This course consists of three lectures per day for five days (each lecture has 90 minutes)and the number of students attending this course is 26 in 2011, 17 in 2012 and 39 in 2013. In thiscourse, students mainly learn the management of software intensive systems development projectsfrom the viewpoint of the provider such as requirements analysis and architectural design.There is a study investigating the relationships between the variation in the personality profile of pairedstudents and their academic performance in Pair Programming [1]. However, in practical courses onsoftware intensive business systems, we do not yet have an established method for determining whatkind of personal characteristics and team compositions are most beneficial to obtaining the maximaleducational effectiveness.In this study, we use the Five Factors and Stress (FFS) theory [2] to quantify the personalcharacteristics and we ask students to answer same questionnaire before and after the course tomeasure how improved their knowledge and skills. This questionnaire consists of about 40 questionsand each student answers them in six degrees. As example of the questions, there is “Can youanalyze requirements?”. In many cases, the business of acquiring and providing software intensivesystems is carried out as a team-based activity. Therefore, to teach actual business concepts, werandomly compose teams regardless of personal characteristics. The number of teams formed was 6,4 and 8 for 2011, 2012 and 2013, respectively. This is an additional study of our paper [3] and assignificant differences, we add the data of the course of 2013 in Waseda University and we analyzethe data through 3 years (2011 - 2013).We investigate the relationships between personal characteristics and educational effectiveness toreveal the common tendency. Through t-test and boxplot, we clearly see that variations in the teammembers' personal characteristics have an effect on educational effectiveness. Large variation teamacquires approximately 1.5 times higher educational effectiveness than small one. From this result, itis better for a team to have members with different characteristics in FFS theory for acquiring moreknowledge and skills through course. We expect that in similar practical courses, we can also obtainthe desirable educational effectiveness if we can compose a team with the suitable characteristics asbased on our findings.