This project aims to serve the national interest by helping undergraduate computer science students develop the soft skills needed for successful careers in software development. The most common type of software development project is called a Brownfield project, in which a software solution is developed within an existing software system. In a Brownfield project, developers modify, debug, refine, and expand an existing code base that they may not have been originally involved in writing. Although most modern software design projects are Brownfield projects, undergraduate computer science curricula focus almost exclusively on teaching students to write code from scratch. This emphasis on "design from scratch" leads to graduates who lack key soft skills required in the software profession today. These skills include the ability to plan, reflect on, and direct the programming process; the ability to locate, assess, and apply needed information; and the ability to ask and answer questions in team settings. This project aims to involve instructors, students, education experts, and professional software developers in designing Brownfield programming assignments and teaching strategies that will help undergraduates in computer science courses gain these skills. The project includes a series of rigorous research studies that will provide insights into the educational effectiveness of this educational approach. The findings from these studies will inform efforts to integrate Brownfield projects into undergraduate STEM education at other colleges or universities and in other STEM fields.
The Brownfield pedagogy will apply social learning theory. It will require students to first complete a series of multimedia instructional modules that provide explicit instruction on the targeted soft skills (i.e. metacognition, information literacy, and communication). Students will then be placed on teams and tasked with fixing bugs and implementing features in an existing code base. A specialized dashboard will scaffold the process through strategic prompts and guidance. The dashboard will also log data about the students' software development processes, search queries, and online interactions with teammates. The project will use a participatory design process for iterative improvements that enable the pedagogy to be educationally effective and readily adaptable to a variety of instructional contexts. Through pilot studies and a quasi-experimental study involving 10 instructors and over 4,500 students at seven diverse institutions, the project will gain insight into the pedagogy's educational effectiveness. The study will explore the relationships between formation of soft skills and development of programming abilities. In addition, the project will contribute novel approaches to measuring soft skills development and new understandings of the interplay between soft and technical skills development. It also aims to develop new theories about the collective contributions of metacognitive, information literacy, and communication skills in self-regulated learning and technical skills development. The pedagogy and technologies developed through this project may be useful as a model for supporting and assessing Brownfield projects in other STEM disciplines. As a result, the project addresses a national priority by helping to produce graduates who possess 21st century STEM workplace skills. This Engaged Student Learning project is supported by the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program: Education and Human Resources (IUSE: EHR), which supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all undergraduate students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
