Assessing Software Design Skills and their Relation with Reasoning Skills

Lecturers see students struggle learning software design. In order to create educational interventions it is needed to know which reasoning skills are related to students’ software design performance. We introduce an online test for measuring students’ software design skills and relate those with abstract reasoning. Two student groups of two different European universities participated in an experiment in which we were able to relate students’ visual and verbal reasoning skills to students’ software design skills and measured learning improvement. In the future proper interventions can be chosen while using the test as a diagnostic tool.

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