Yusuke Yamada, Shota Inaga, Hironori Washizaki, Katsuhiko Kakehi, Yoshiaki Fukazawa, Shoso Yamato, Masashi Okubo, Teruhiko Kume, Manabu Tamaki, “The Impacts of Personal Characteristic on Educational Effectiveness in controlled-Project Based Learning on Software Intensive Systems Development,” Proceedings of the 27th Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T 2014), pp.XX-YY, Alpen-Adria Universitat Klagenfurt, Austria, April 23-25, 2014. (to appear) (CSEE&T2014ver34.pdf)

In practical courses on software-intensive business systems, students work in teams to acquire practical skills in systems acquisition and provisioning. However, we do not yet have an established method to determine the optimal team composition to achieve maximum educational effectiveness. In this study, we quantitatively and qualitatively investigate how the personal characteristics and the learning process of team members affect educational effectiveness by examining a university course in which students work in teams on a realistic project in a classroom setting. We use the Five Factors and Stress (FFS) theory and the modified grounded theory approach (M-GTA) to measure the personal characteristics and identify the learning process of each team member. Additionally, we compare the learning process which a team to have high educational effectiveness have with the one which a team to have low educational effectiveness have. As a result, we find that it is better for a team to have members with different personal characteristic as defined by FFS theory in order for the students to acquire more knowledge and skills through the course. Additionally, teams that focus on a smaller portion of the learning process acquire more knowledge and skills. We expect our findings to be applicable to increasing the educational effectiveness of other similar practical courses.