Does like seek like?: The formation of working groups in a programming project

Eduard Sanou Gozalo,Ramon Ferrer-I-Cancho,Antonio Hernandez-Fernandez,Marta Arias

doi:10.3926/jotse.255

Eduard Sanou Gozalo, Ramon Ferrer-I-Cancho + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3926/jotse.255

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Abstract

In a course of the degree of computer science, the programming project has changed from individual to teamed work, tentatively in couples (pair programming). Students have full freedom to team up with minimum intervention from teachers. The analysis of the couples made indicates that students do not tend to associate with students with a similar academic performance, maybe because general cognitive parameters do not govern the choice of academic partners. Pair programming seems to give great results, so the efforts of future research in this field should focus precisely on how these pairs are formed, underpinning the mechanisms of human social interactions.

Highlights

Pair programming has been the subject of several studies arguing that this way of coding improves communication and team working skills, given a minimum temporal investment, in addition to reducing errors in programming and improving the quality of the generated code (Cockburn & Williams, 2001; Hughes, 2015)
What happens in our classroom, ? When our students work in groups, do they select a friend as their partner, or a classmate who will help them improve their grade? Or, taking this even further, are we generally friends with people who are similar to us? In this study, we analyze empirical team formation data from a programming course of a degree in computer science in our University in the context of current educational neuroscience research
Our data corresponds to the 2015 spring semester of the Programming 2 (PRO2) course, the first in which the programming project of computer science was done in teams

Summary

Introduction

Pair programming (programming in couples) has been the subject of several studies arguing that this way of coding improves communication and team working skills, given a minimum temporal investment, in addition to reducing errors in programming and improving the quality of the generated code (Cockburn & Williams, 2001; Hughes, 2015). The formation of homogeneous or heterogeneous work groups is a classic problem in science education (Esposito, 1973), a central topic in cooperative learning (Ashman & Gillies, 2003). In Psychology and Cognitive Science, the problem of social decision making has been studied from different perspectives, ranging from selecting sexual partners to product purchase Both emotional and rational factors are usually taken into account (Hsee & Hastie, 2006, for a review), and, in general, it is well known that we tend to associate with humans with similar characteristics to our own, even genetically (Rushton, 1989; Fowler, Settleb & Christakis, 2011). We explore whether academic factors play a role in the selection of partner in pair programming

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