To Get Good Student Ratings should you only Teach Programming Courses? Investigation and Implications of Student Evaluations of Teaching in a Software Engineering Context

Abstract

Student evaluations of teaching (SET) are commonly used in universities for assessing teaching quality. However, previous literature shows that in software engineering students tend to rate certain topics higher than others: In particular students tend to value programming and software construction over software design, software engineering models and methods, or soft skills. We hypothesize that these biases also play a role in SET responses collected from students. The objective of this study is to investigate how the topic of a software engineering course affects the SET metrics. We accomplish this by performing multilevel regression analysis on SET data collected in a software engineering programme. We analyzed a total of 1295 student evaluations from 46 university courses in a Finnish university. The results of the analysis verifies that the student course evaluations exhibit similar biases as distinguished by previous software engineering education research. The type of the course can predict a higher SET rating. In our dataset, software construction and programming courses received higher SET ratings compared to courses on software engineering processes, models, and methods.

Everything but Programming; Investigating Academics’ Perceptions of Embedded Soft Skills in Computer Science Undergraduate Education

“…This preconception echoes previous findings that students think non-technical skills are unnecessary for technical careers [32]. While educators and employers agree with the importance of soft skills, our findings suggest staff do not perceive students to recognise the value of soft skills, aligning with previous findings where students undervalue soft skills [10] in favour of the skills they enjoy [37].…”

“…Students also conflate enjoyment with value during tasks [37] and so if students have a negative experience with an activity or project that they associate with soft skills, they will attach a lower value to these soft skills, in favour of tasks and activities that they see as more enjoyable. This may feed into their conception that technical skills are more important [33], for example programming tasks can be typically autonomous alleviating the need for collaboration with others, and it can be satisfying to solve problems through code.…”

“…Students may refuse soft skills because they devalue any skills associated with tasks they find challenging and avoid both the task and similar tasks that involve the same skills. Their reduced value results in students attending less focus on their development in favour of activities that they find more enjoyable or rewarding [37]. the workplace, which may involve managing or leading a team as they progress through their careers.…”

Co-Constructing a Community of Practice for Early-Career Computer Science Academics in the UK

“…For example, the teaching of introductory programming effectively has persistent issues [3,17,22], attrition and failure rates can be high, with a range of issues impacting barriers to progression [30]. Student satisfaction as measured by satisfaction surveys is reported as commonly below that of other disciplines [23] and varies across the discipline with some subdiscipline areas facing particular challenges to navigate [13]. Discipline related challenges linked to delivering teamwork are also reported [7,19].…”

Student and Faculty Perceptions of Ineffective Teaching Behaviours

“…For example, they have been shown to be influenced by a number of irrelevant factors such as the faculty's sex gender, race/ethnicity, and even the presentation of cookies during their completion (Al-Issa & Sulieman, 2007;Hessler et al, 2018;Lin & Kennette, 2022). These evaluations also pose a risk in that faculty could change their educational choices or the courses they offer to better satisfy their customers (i.e., the student) rather than for sound pedagogical reasons (see Knutas et al, 2021), especially since they are often the basis of tenure and promotion decisions. Some teaching and learning scholars have suggested that "bad" teaching is having a teacher-centred approach while "good" teaching is more consistently focused on the student (i.e., learner-centred approach to learning).…”