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Improving Critical Thinking in Software Development via Interdisciplinary Projects at a Most Diverse College

Published: 07 October 2020 Publication History

Abstract

The software industry has been seeing a steady growth worldwide. However, the quality of the developed software is tightly related to the supply of skilled and capable software developers who are able to cope with many challenges and maintain a high level of critical thinking during the software development life cycle. Software skills are usually gained in upper level software development courses in undergraduate IT majors. We have been applying an active learning methodology for teaching critical thinking in the classroom. Our college is one of the most diverse colleges in the southeast region, which makes our classroom a good model of national diversity. In assessing critical thinking, the traditional and generic approach is to measure skills that are universal and subject-agnostic. In this study, we report that the universal skill assessment for software development is ineffective in measuring students? growth based on inconclusive testing results and a weak test-retest reliability score. We suspect that students were unmotivated by several factors, which includes students being passive listeners and the subject being unrelated to software. In addition, we report a significant potential for developing domain-specific critical thinking exercises and testing that could serve to train the students and to assess their skills at the same time. We would like to emphasize that our conclusion is independent of software development, and could be generalized to develop exercises for other subjects.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Future Competences for the European Software Sector: A Mixed-Method Approach36th Bled eConference – Digital Economy and Society: The Balancing Act for Digital Innovation in Times of Instability: June 25 – 28, 2023, Bled, Slovenia, Conference Proceedings10.18690/um.fov.6.2023.36(560-576)Online publication date: 12-Dec-2023
  • (2023)Hands-on Workshops Improve Learning of Software Engineering SkillsProceedings of the 24th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education10.1145/3585059.3611440(48-53)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2023
  • (2021)An Open Educational Resource for an Agile Software Engineering CourseProceedings of the 22st Annual Conference on Information Technology Education10.1145/3450329.3476849(51-52)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2021

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGITE '20: Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference on Information Technology Education
October 2020
446 pages
ISBN:9781450370455
DOI:10.1145/3368308
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 07 October 2020

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Author Tags

  1. cat
  2. critical thinking
  3. pbl
  4. project based learning
  5. software development
  6. software engineering
  7. teaching

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  • Research-article

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  • University System of Georgia
  • NSF-IUSE

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SIGITE '20
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View all
  • (2023)Future Competences for the European Software Sector: A Mixed-Method Approach36th Bled eConference – Digital Economy and Society: The Balancing Act for Digital Innovation in Times of Instability: June 25 – 28, 2023, Bled, Slovenia, Conference Proceedings10.18690/um.fov.6.2023.36(560-576)Online publication date: 12-Dec-2023
  • (2023)Hands-on Workshops Improve Learning of Software Engineering SkillsProceedings of the 24th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education10.1145/3585059.3611440(48-53)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2023
  • (2021)An Open Educational Resource for an Agile Software Engineering CourseProceedings of the 22st Annual Conference on Information Technology Education10.1145/3450329.3476849(51-52)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2021

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