2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this paper we study the efficacy of Peer Instruction (PI) as a pedagogy for teaching the SOLID principles of software design in an in-person undergraduate software engineering classroom. SOLID principle based software design is an important topic in helping students get ready to work in the software industry. Peer Instruction (PI) is an active learning pedagogy in which students actively participate in their own learning by discussing questions with small groups of peers during class, providing real-time feedback to the instructor through an online portal, or a handheld student response system device, or through manual raising of hands or flashcards. Several studies on PI in computing exist, but very few studies focus on PI in the topic of software design in general and/or SOLID principles in particular. In this pilot study we focus on comparing correctness gains for students learning SOLID principles through lecture-based instruction and PI. We utilized a purely lecture based approach in one semester, followed by PI in the next semester. We developed our own PI questions for SOLID principles, which is another unique contribution of this study. We conducted pre- and post course surveys for both the lecture iteration as well as the PI iteration of the course. We analyzed over 140 student responses to the pre- and post- surveys to determine if PI had helped students learn and recognize SOLID principles more effectively than lectures. Cognitively, we found a correlation between PI and student learning, by observing encouraging increases in levels of success as measured through cognitive pre- and post-course survey, for SOLID principles. We found statistically significant correctness gains for students with PI over lectures, indicating that students learned better using PI than they did through lectures. We categorized our findings regarding the student population in general, as well as in specific underrepresented minorities in computing. In this regard, we found that PI helped students of marginalized identities, specifically students of color, women, and first-generation students in computing statistically significantly more than lectures did, with their cognitive gains. From a SOLID principles perspective, PI also seemed to have helped students with little to no prior internship experiences do at least as well as students with one or more industry internships leading up to the course.