Assessment - Guide to Teaching Computer Science: An Activity-Based Approach - page 190

10.3.1 Individual Projects

Meerbaum-Salant and Hazzan ( 2010 ) suggest three resources for the evaluation
of software project developed by pupils individually: the teacher, peers (i.e., other
pupils in the class), and the learner who develops the project. We elaborate on each
of them.

• Teacher evaluation can be performed in two ways:
− Formative Project Assessment This assessment is carried out by the teacher
during the entire process of project development with respect to (almost) each
activity that the student performs. The purpose of formative assessment is to
guide the pupils in the development process in order to support their develop-
ment process and improve their understanding of the relevant CS contents.
− Summative Project Assessment The teacher can perform summative assess-
ment several times during the development process, usually at the end of spe-
cific stages, to monitor the students' and class' progress.
• Peer project assessment can be carried out, for example, in the following way:
The pupils are divided into groups. Each pupil presents his or her project to the
other group members and receives their feedback.
• Individual project feedback/evaluation can be encouraged by asking each pupil
to reflect on his or her work and on the way he or she plans to meet the schedule
that the teacher set for the entire class. See Chap. 5 for a broader discussion about
reflection and reflective processes.

10.3.2 Team Projects

Software projects developed by teams are common in undergraduate CS education,
and specifically, in capstone courses that the students study in their senior year.
This attention is reflected, for example, in the SIGCSE 2014 conferences: 15 out
of 105 presented papers referred to the integration of software projects in differ-
ent academic courses (e.g., Brown et al. 2014 ) as well as to their evaluation (e.g.,
Vasilevskaya et al. 2014 ). In these courses, undergraduate CS students develop a
software project, in most cases in teams, that encapsulates what the students have
studied during their undergraduate studies.
Studies that address student software projects usually deal with issues such as
the assignment of students to groups (Redmond 2001 ; Smith and Smarkusky 2005 ;
Bender et al. 2012 ), the coordination of teamwork (Moses et al. 2000 ), the grading
of such projects (Chamillard and Merkle 2002 ), and ways by which instructors can
gain information about the contribution of individual students to the team project
(Lawhead and Wilkins 2000 ; Vasilevskaya et al. 2014 ).
In this spirit, the following discussion about the evaluation of projects developed
by teams is especially relevant for software projects developed by undergraduate
students, but nevertheless can be applied also in the high school setting.