THE IMPACT OF COMMUNITY-BASED FIELDWORK EXPERIENCES ON FFECTIVE DOMAIN AMONG SOFTWARE ENGINEERING UNDERGRADUATES

This research is to examine the occurrences of affective domain learning when software engineering undergraduates were engaged in a community-based fieldwork to gather software requirements by investigating the effects of the fieldwork on different levels of affective domain. A quantitative approach using a quantitative survey was used in which data were elicited from a group of software engineering undergraduates consisting of 59 female and 38 male students. Through the survey, five levels of affective domain were investigated based on the following attributes: receiving, responding, valuing, organizing, and internalizing values. Several statistical analyses were used including descriptive analysis, paired t-test and Spearmen’s correlation analysis. As a result, the descriptive analysis showed a high occurrence of each attribute at every level of the affective domain. Further analyses with a series of paired t-tests revealed that the respondents’ knowledge of the five sub-procedures had improved significantly after the fieldwork. Whilst with Spearmen’s correlation analysis, the results showed significant relationships between some levels of the affective domain, with respondents that expressing higher real feelings of frustration (such as due to bad planning or stakeholders’ behaviour) tended to value the requirements gathering process to be highly important, and the same respondents also indicated that they would be willing to perform such a process in their final year project. The results of this study can be useful in making policy and curriculum for software engineering education at a higher institution. The study has shown that software engineering students will value and be more inclined to perform requirements gathering process in their final year project development if they experience and feel how importance the process themselves through a community-based fieldwork. In light of these revelations, more efforts are needed to integrate such a training approach into existing curriculum, which surely can help produce such undergraduates with higher graduate employability.