This research aimed at evaluating the development and use of low-cost affective domain assessment instruments, culminating with personal and group characterization of representative global information technology (IT) professional values. Values and valuing are a compelling component of Bloom's affective domain of learning for engineering education. In helping students develop professional engineering competencies, it is essential that they develop not just cognitive knowledge of something but also values related to that knowledge and the ability to express these values in professional action. However, even if some professional values are identified, understood, and expressed, assessing students’ values and valuing are difficult, and assessment instruments are often difficult to develop, particularly for assessing student learning in the context of a particular course.
This exploratory study aimed at examining assessment of dispositional knowledge in the context of global software engineering (GSE). It focused on the development and use of a set of instruments for assessing affective domain student learning of global IT/software engineering (SE) professional values. The project included making explicit the IT professional values of interest among the participating faculty in the form of actionable value statements. Following a process derived from Thurstone scale development, the project included validation of these statements with an expert panel as question roots, followed by the use of these questions to investigate student and alumni receiving, responding, and valuing of these professional values. The effort needed to generate questionnaires suitable for course use was relatively low; these questionnaires were deployed to students and alumni from an open-ended global software engineering project course. Students responding reported significant agreement when receiving these global values, but sent more mixed responses in responding to and valuing them. The effort helped identify several actionable IT professional values worth reinforcing in future course offerings.
For some time past, interest has been developing within the Aslib Research Department in the problems of establishing standard costs for information systems. A literature search recently conducted by the Department (R. Reynolds) has revealed a scarcity of usable information on this subject: such data as is available is difficult to evaluate comparatively because of the differing definitions of the operations costed and of the terms used to describe them. It would seem, therefore, that a first step towards developing a costing method of widespread application would be the establishment of standard conventions for the analysis of information systems.
With a view to obtaining a set of standard times for information system operations, Aslib Research Department is developing and testing methods for collecting and analysing data on the time taken to perform certain operations. The current state of development of these methods is described. Data collection is by a self‐recording (diary) method, completed at the time of performing the operation. The major problem is one of identifying, describing, and analysing the effect of the various factors which might affect the time. First results indicate that it is possible to explain a large proportion of the variations in individual times by taking account of a sufficient number of variables.
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