Using Focus to Personalise Learning and Feedback in Software Engineering Education

Learning can be greatly enhanced by effective feedback. Traditional assessment approaches in higher education often result in feedback being used to justify marks awarded, which is often disregarded once the assessment is complete. In this paper, we explore the idea of incorporating a focus mechanism to connect feedback between assessment tasks and units, discuss how this can be applied to enhance software engineering education, and present results from several staff focus groups exploring the idea. The focus groups discussed the model, its application within software engineering units, and its limitations, with staff helping co-create the enhancements to the model through discussing experiences/sharing opinions/providing insights on assessment within their units. Results indicate that staff believe that the changes will benefit their teaching and highlighted several opportunities for this initiative to encourage students to have a more holistic view of their studies. The main challenges identified were staff workload and complexity for students which must be addressed in implementing this idea.