Using Students as Subjects in Experiments--A Quantitative Analysis of the Influence of Experimentation on Students´ Learning Proces

The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether using students as subjects in software engineering experiments improves their learning process. In this paper we describe experiences with experimenting with students from several experiments. We show how these experiments were related to the courses and how we used them as an auxiliary tool for teaching. We perform a survey among the students who participated in the experiments and we analyze the final grades from the courses with and without experiments. The results show that the percentage of the high-passes increased after introducing experiments by 41%, 91% of students found the experiments to be useful in other courses, a vast majority of students perceived experiments as a good way of applying their knowledge in practice and as a good way of getting acquainted with empirical methods in software engineering (which was not the subject of the course). The implications of our research are that including carefully designed experiments into courses improve students´ learning process and increase their motivation. The novelty of the paper is the perspective of students´ learning perspective rather than researchers´ benefits. The results help the teachers to take advantage of experiments to increase the students´ learning.