The Impact of Undergraduate Mentorship on Student Satisfaction and Engagement, Teamwork Performance, and Team Dysfunction in a Software Engineering Group Project

Abstract

Mentorship schemes in software engineering education usually involve professional software engineers guiding and advising teams of undergraduate students working collaboratively to develop a software system. With or without mentorship, teams run the risk of experiencing team dysfunction: a situation where lack of engagement, internal conicts, and/or poor team management lead to dierent assessment outcomes for individual team members and overall frustration and dissatisfaction within the team. The paper describes a mentorship scheme devised as part of a 33 week software engineering group project course, where the mentors were undergraduate students who had recently completed the course successfully and possessed at least a year's experience as professional software engineers. We measure and discuss the impact the scheme had on: (1) student satisfaction and engagement, (2) team performance, and (3) team dysfunction.

Tecnologias na Educação em Computação: Primeiros Referenciais

“…Podemos citar alguns outros interesses de pesquisa da EC tais como: Psicologia da EC (Duran, Sorva e Leite, 2018), mentoria profissional de graduandos de Computação (Iacob e Faily, 2020), ensino da honestidade acadêmica na Computação (Malan, Yu e Lloyd, 2020), e a influência da língua materna em erros de compilação (Reestman e Dorn, 2019). RBIE v.28 -2020 3 Informática na Educação Não é fácil encontrar definições explícitas e claras na literatura sobre o que seria a Informática na Educação (IE).…”

Work in Progress: Review of Teaching Strategies Towards Development of a Framework for Online Teamwork

“…TAs are critical for a team based model to be successful [43]. TAs should be assigned to specific groups to look after to track the students' performance effectively.…”

Positive Impact of an S-STEM Scholarship Program on Computer Science Students’ Academic Performance and Retention Rate

“…The first component is peer mentoring, which has been reported to be an effective approach to recruit and retain students [6], [7], [8] as well as improve academic performance [9], [10]. Our peer-mentoring program focuses on providing assistance and guidance to help students better prepare for computing careers.…”

“…Peer mentoring has been proven to be an effective approach among different disciplines to promote student success. Successful stories of peer mentoring in STEM fields have been reported across the nation to engage first-year students [13], to improve academic performance on a specific course or topic [9], [10], to involve students in research [14], and to recruit and retain students, especially women and minorities [6], [7], [8].…”