Shota Inaga, Hironori Washizaki, Yusuke Yamada, Katsuhiko Kakehi, Yoshiaki Fukazawa, Shoso Yamato, Masashi Okubo, Teruhiko Kume, Manabu Tamaki, “Relationships Between Variations of Personal Characteristics and Educational Effectiveness in Group Assignment of Software Intensive Systems Development,” Proceedings of the 8th International Technology, Education and Development Conference (INTED 2014), pp.XX-YY, March 10-12, 2014, Valencia, Spain

In this study, we use the Five Factors and Stress (FFS) theory to quantify the personal characteristics and we ask students to answer same questionnaire before and after the lecture to measure how improved their knowledge and skills. This questionnaire consists of about 40 questions and each student answers them in six degrees. As example of the questions, there is “Can you analyse requirements?”. In many cases, the business of acquiring and providing software intensive business systems is carried out as a team-based activity. Therefore, to teach actual business concepts, we randomly compose teams regardless of personal characteristics. The number of teams formed was 6, 4 and 8 for 2011, 2012 and 2013, respectively. This is an additional study of our paper and as significant differences, we add the data of the lecture of 2013 in Waseda University and we analyse the data through 3 years (2011 – 2013).

We investigate the relationships between personal characteristics and educational effectiveness to reveal the common tendency. As a result, we clearly see that variations in the team members’ personal characteristics have an effect on educational effectiveness from t-test and boxplot. It is better for a team to have members with different characteristics in FFS theory for acquiring more knowledge and skills through lecture. It is expected that in similar practical lectures, we can also obtain the desirable educational effectiveness if we can compose a team with the suitable characteristics as based on our findings.