Peer learning efficacy analysis on undergraduate software design course

Abstract

Knowledge sharing and peer learning are important characteristics for learning similar engineering topics, especially suitable for the learning in college. Software design is an advanced required course for software engineering departments. However, most students might have no enough incentives to learn it by themselves. To distinguish the performance of the peer learning, we adopted the peer learning in software design course to analyze the possibility of adoption. Our selected course was a junior major and held on the second semester. Its regulations are declared twice before the due date of the course selection. Students can group their peer learning team by at most three ones, so they can choose as individual learning. Both review and summary quizzes were held at the first and the last 15-min in the Moodle every week, respectively. There were 34 students attending this experiment with four 3-student groups, five 2-student groups, and 12 singles. A web-based tool was designed to illustrate the peer learning performance and students can browse their own score analysis anywhere. Inside the experimental weeks, we found most students attend the course on time. Though the effect of the adopted approach (may be due to too few samples) is not clear, we found evidence from the descriptive statistics and detailed analyses of the experiment results. The peer learning by grouping could have large chance to be better than individual study. It encourages us to adopt the same educational practice to our software design course, even other software related courses.