The impact of undergraduate mentorship on student satisfaction and engagement, teamwork performance, and team dysfunction in a software engineering group project.

Iacob, Claudia; Faily, Shamal

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 conflicts, and/or poor team management lead to different 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.

Citation

IACOB, C. and FAILY, S. 2020. The impact of undergraduate mentorship on student satisfaction and engagement, teamwork performance, and team dysfunction in a software engineering group project. In Proceedings of the 51st ACM technical symposium on computer science education (SIGCSE 2020), 11-14 March 2020, Portland, USA. New York: ACM [online], pages 128-134. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1145/3328778.3366835

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 51st ACM technical symposium on computer science education (SIGCSE 2020)
• Start Date: Mar 11, 2020
• End Date: Mar 14, 2020
• Acceptance Date: Oct 4, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Feb 26, 2020
• Publication Date: Dec 31, 2020
• Deposit Date: Sep 16, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 14, 2021
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 128-134
• ISBN: 9781450367936
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3328778.3366835
• Keywords: Software engineering education; Computing education; Undergraduate students; Mentorship; Student satisfaction; Student engagement; Student performance; Group projects; Teamwork
• Public URL: https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/1437859