Evaluation and Use of a Student-Centered Syllabus for the Software Process Subject in a Postgraduate Course: A Quasi-Experiment

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article is within the scope of the journal, and describes an interesting topic.

 

It is well written, and organized. His reading is fluent.

 

Regarding the content, the article presents a well-designed experiment and a discussion of the results.

 

However, some aspects need to be improved:

1) The state of the art should be extended.

2) The discussion of the results should be deeper. The presented work should be compared with other similar works, describing the advances and limitations of the work.

3) The conclusions should be improved by indicating the scientific contribution of the work and proposing a set of lines of future work.

4) The bibliography used should be more modern in some cases (after 2010).

5) The image in figure 2 is not clear. Replace it with another.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The applied experiment of a Student-Centered Syllabus for the Software Process Subject at the university is very interestingly set up. The paper is correctly written, but it still needs to be improved in terms of structure and content in order to be accepted.

The proposed abstract does not highlight the specifics of your research or findings. Rewrite the Abstract section to be more meaningful. I suggest that you include the following elements: Problem Analysis, Aim, Background of experimental student groups, Used Methods, Results, and Conclusion. Certain elements can be described in several sentences.

The introduction section can be extended to add the issues in the context of the existing work and how the proposed approaches can be used to overcome this. I suggest that the second section (Teaching Software Process) be integrated into the introductory one. The introduction must include more information about the course, the university, as well as the background of the students who are the students of this experiment (we don't know anything except that they are in postgraduate studies - what did they have from previous courses? What department are they from? Is the course/subject compulsory or elective?).

Nowhere in the introduction is the terminology from the title mentioned "A Quasi-Experiment", so it is necessary to insert it in one paragraph. It is understandable to me due to many years of research in this field, but not to other readers. The problems of this work are not clearly stated. There is ambiguity in the statement understanding. Please, add also the main contributions list as points in the Introduction section, before the description of the paper structure.

Sections 3 and 5 should be merged because they both belong to the methodology. They should be preceded by a section on existing research (current section 4).

More clarification and research highlights should be added in the related works section. Identified research gaps and contributions of the proposed study should be elaborated in comparison with existing research.

The authors should consider more recent research done in the field of their study (Flipped Classroom, Gamification, PBL, etc.) such as:

1) G. Akçayır, M. Akçayır, The flipped classroom: A review of its advantages and challenges, Computers & Education, Volume 126, 2018.

2) Khe Foon Hew, Shurui Bai, Phillip Dawson, Chung Kwan Lo, Meta-analyses of flipped classroom studies: A review of methodology, Educational Research Review, Volume 33, 2021.

3) Kalogiannakis, M.; Papadakis, S.; Zourmpakis, A.-I. Gamification in Science Education. A Systematic Review of the Literature. Educ. Sci. 2021, 11, 22. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11010022

4) Draskovic, D., Cvetanovic, M., & Nikolic, B. (2018). SAIL—Software system for learning AI algorithms. Computer Applications in Engineering Education, 26(5), 1195-1216.

5) Santos, A.C.G., Oliveira, W., Hamari, J. et al. The relationship between user types and gamification designs. User Model User-Adap Inter 31, 907–940 (2021).

6) Farrow, J.; Kavanagh, S.S.; Samudra, P. Exploring Relationships between Professional Development and Teachers’ Enactments of Project-Based Learning. Educ. Sci. 2022, 12, 282. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci12040282

7) Chih-Hung Chen, Chin-Chung Tsai, In-service teachers' conceptions of mobile technology-integrated instruction: Tendency towards student-centered learning, Computers & Education, Volume 170, 2021.

8) Draskovic, D. (2019). Development of intelligent systems and application of gamification in artificial intelligent learning. In 2019 27th Telecommunications Forum (TELFOR) (pp. 1-1). IEEE.

etc...

Are there any return branches in Figure 1? Even the traditional software development (Waterfall) approach has been modified with backward branches in all recent research. If they are not required, describe clearly why?

In Table 1, it makes more sense for me to have first the experimental group (left) and then the control group (right). Below table 1, it is necessary to describe the differences between:

A) the environments you use (SIGAA - what is it? Describe in a paragraph; also Google classroom and Whatsapp - we all use them but what do you use inside them?)

B) teaching units 1, 2, 3 ? (you describe them but without going into any details)

Above the table, describe why exactly 10 students were taken per group. Were there not more students, or were there other reasons? Is it possible to implement the experiment if we have more students in the course? 

Also, apart from the master's students, it is not clear where the doctoral students in the master's course come from, and what does the term "listening students" mean?

Table 1 has too much repetitive information. Please rearrange it, so that, for example, with the experimental group you write: "Same as for Teaching Unit 1, except Dynamics" for TU2 and TU3. In this way, the table extends over many pages and is very illegible.

It is not mentioned how many point scales are defined in table 1. Are the scales for MC1/2/3/AI1...AI4/PR1/PR2 uniform, and what are the values on the scales? (and max values)

In Table 1, nowhere in the formula does the coefficient AI5 appear. Uniformize the data in the legend (PROJ) and in the formula (PR). It is necessary to discuss the relationships for the points in the formulas, why were they chosen that way?

It is necessary to give some concrete examples of the topics covered in the course, as well as some examples of the working methods themselves (individual or teamwork? quizzes or tasks or program codes? etc.) The approach "Shapiro-Wilk test" is insufficiently explained.

For Threats to validity, I would like to see a graphical diagram in the form of a SWOT analysis, i.e. a comparison with the traditional approach. The current section is too textual, without any strong conclusions or stated limitations, so I do not see its contribution to this research. The advantages and the limitations must be described well here, before Conclusion.

Please rewrite the Conclusion section to have the following elements:

- You need to highlight more clearly the theoretical and practical implications of your research

- Discuss research contributions.

- List the practical advantages (in at least one separate paragraph),

- Discuss the limitations of the research (at least one separate paragraph),

- Provide 2-3 solid and insightful suggestions for future research.

The language used throughout this paper needs to be improved, the author should do some proofreading on it. Give the article a mild language revision to get rid of a few complex sentences that hinder readability and eradicate typo errors. In many words, a middle line ( - ) appears that divides the word into syllables (from abstract to conclusion), so it should be discarded. In figure 2, the title ran away from this figure.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper can be accepted in current form