Article

Towards increasing the compatibility of student pair programmers

Authors:

Neha Katira,

Laurie Williams,

Jason OsborneAuthors Info & Claims

ICSE '05: Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering

Pages 625 - 626

https://doi.org/10.1145/1062455.1062572

Published: 15 May 2005 Publication History

Get Access

Abstract

As pair programming is used widely in software engineering education, instructors may wish to proactively form pairs to increase the likelihood of compatible pairs. A study involving 361 software engineering students was carried out at North Carolina State University to understand and predict pair compatibility. We have found that students are compatible with partners whom they perceive of similar skill, although instructors cannot proactively manage this perception. Pairing of two minority students is more likely and mixed gender pairs are less likely to be compatible. Additionally, pairing of students with similar actual skill level as measured by midterm grades in class, GPA, and SAT/GRE scores also likely results in compatible pairs. Our research addresses the following challenges faced by instructors in software engineering: 1) organizational concern in pairing of students; 2) increasing the retention rates of female and minority students in classes; and 3) proactively forming mutually-compatible pairs.

References

[1]

Katira, N., Williams, L., Wiebe, E., Miller, C., Balik, S., Gehringer, E. On Understanding the Compatibility of Student Pair Programmers, Proceedings of ACM SIGCSE 2004, Norfolk, VA, 2004, pp. 7--11.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[2]

Margolis, J., Fisher, A. and Miller, F., Caring about Connections: Gender and Computing, IEEE Technology and Society Magazine/, Vol. 18 Issue 4, 1999, pp. 13--20.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[3]

Melnik, G. and Maurer, F., Perceptions of Agile Practices: A Student Survey, Extreme Programming/Agile Universe, Chicago, IL, 2002.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[4]

National Center for Education Statistics: Digest of Education Statistics, 1990-2002, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, 1990--2002.

Google Scholar

[5]

Nelson, C., "Student Diversity Requires Different Approaches to College Teaching, Even in Math and Science," American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 40, 1996, pp. 165--175.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[6]

Thomas, L., Ratcliffe, M. and A. Robertson, Code Warriors and Code-a-Phobes: A study in attitude and pair programming, ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE), Reno, NV, 2003, 363--367.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[7]

Treisman, U. "Studying students studying calculus: A look at the lives of minority mathematics students in college.," The College Mathematics Journal, vol. 23, 1992, pp. 362--372.

Crossref

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Wang YZhang R(2024)Research on the Pair Programming Partner Recommendation Method Based on Personalized Learning FeaturesComputer Science and Educational Informatization10.1007/978-981-99-9492-2_29(342-357)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-9492-2_29
Xu FCorreia A(2023)Adopting distributed pair programming as an effective team learning activity: a systematic reviewJournal of Computing in Higher Education10.1007/s12528-023-09356-336:2(320-349)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12528-023-09356-3
Jarratt LBowman NCulver KSegre AScharlau BMcDermott RPears ASabin M(2019)A Large-Scale Experimental Study of Gender and Pair Composition in Pair ProgrammingProceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3304221.3319782(176-181)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3304221.3319782
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Towards increasing the compatibility of student pair programmers
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Collaboration in software development
      1. Programming teams

Recommendations

On understanding compatibility of student pair programmers
SIGCSE '04: Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education

In recent years, educators have increasingly used pair programming in their computer science courses. Pair programming has been shown to be beneficial for both the teaching staff and the students in the courses. Occasionally, though, students are not ...
On understanding compatibility of student pair programmers

In recent years, educators have increasingly used pair programming in their computer science courses. Pair programming has been shown to be beneficial for both the teaching staff and the students in the courses. Occasionally, though, students are not ...
Examining the Compatibility of Student Pair Programmers
AGILE '06: Proceedings of the conference on AGILE 2006

Pair programming has been shown to be beneficial for both students and teaching staff in university courses. A two-phased study of 1350 students was conducted at North Carolina State University from 2002-2005 to determine if teaching staff can ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

ICSE '05: Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering

May 2005

754 pages

ISBN:1581139632

DOI:10.1145/1062455

General Chair:
Gruia-Catalin Roman
Washington University in St. Louis
,
Program Chairs:
William Griswold
University of California, San Diego
,
Bashar Nuseibeh
The Open University, UK

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 May 2005

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

ICSE05

Sponsor:

ICSE05: 27th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 15 - 21, 2005

MO, St. Louis, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%

Upcoming Conference

ICSE 2025

2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

April 26 - May 3, 2025

Ottawa , ON , Canada

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

49
Total Citations
View Citations
570
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)3
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 19 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Wang YZhang R(2024)Research on the Pair Programming Partner Recommendation Method Based on Personalized Learning FeaturesComputer Science and Educational Informatization10.1007/978-981-99-9492-2_29(342-357)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-9492-2_29
Xu FCorreia A(2023)Adopting distributed pair programming as an effective team learning activity: a systematic reviewJournal of Computing in Higher Education10.1007/s12528-023-09356-336:2(320-349)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12528-023-09356-3
Jarratt LBowman NCulver KSegre AScharlau BMcDermott RPears ASabin M(2019)A Large-Scale Experimental Study of Gender and Pair Composition in Pair ProgrammingProceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3304221.3319782(176-181)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3304221.3319782
Ott LBettin BUreel LPolycarpou IRead JAndreou PArmoni M(2018)The impact of placement in introductory computer science courses on student persistence in a computing majorProceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3197091.3197139(296-301)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3197091.3197139
Zhong BWang QChen J(2016)The impact of social factors on pair programming in a primary schoolComputers in Human Behavior10.1016/j.chb.2016.07.01764:C(423-431)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.chb.2016.07.017
Lenberg PFeldt RWallgren L(2015)Behavioral software engineeringJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2015.04.084107:C(15-37)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2015.04.084
Wood KParsons DGasson JHaden P(2013)It's never too earlyProceedings of the Fifteenth Australasian Computing Education Conference - Volume 13610.5555/2667199.2667201(13-21)Online publication date: 29-Jan-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2667199.2667201
Radermacher AWalia GRummelt RSmith King LMusicant DCamp TTymann P(2012)Assigning student programming pairs based on their mental model consistencyProceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/2157136.2157236(325-330)Online publication date: 29-Feb-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2157136.2157236
Sfetsos PAdamidis PAngelis LStamelos IDeligiannis I(2012)Investigating the Impact of Personality and Temperament Traits on Pair ProgrammingProceedings of the 2012 Eighth International Conference on the Quality of Information and Communications Technology10.1109/QUATIC.2012.36(57-65)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/QUATIC.2012.36
Carter JWhite SFraser KKurkovsky SMcCreesh CWieck M(2010)ITiCSE 2010 working group report motivating our top studentsProceedings of the 2010 ITiCSE working group reports10.1145/1971681.1971685(29-47)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1971681.1971685
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

On understanding compatibility of student pair programmers

On understanding compatibility of student pair programmers

Examining the Compatibility of Student Pair Programmers