The impacts of personal characteristic on educational effectiveness in controlled-project based learning on software intensive systems development

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 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 to identify the learning process of each team member. Additionally, we compare the learning process of a team with a high educational effectiveness to one with a low educational effectiveness based on number of topics about the learning process and the kind of topics. 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 fewer learning process topics acquire more knowledge and skills. We expect that our findings will help increase the educational effectiveness in similar practical courses.