Improving Knowledge Acquisition in Capstone Projects Using Learning Spaces for Experiential Learning

Students have to cope with new technologies, changing environments, and conflicting changes in capstone projects. They often lack practical experience, which might lead to failing to achieve a project's learning goals. Reusing experiences from other students provides a first step towards building up practical knowledge and implementing experiential learning in higher education. In order to further improve knowledge acquisition during experience reuse, we present an approach that generates so-called learning spaces, which automatically enrich experiences with additional learning content and contextual information. To evaluate our approach, we conducted a controlled experiment that showed a statistically significant improvement for knowledge acquisition by 204% compared to conventional experience descriptions. From a technical perspective, the approach provides a good basis for future applications that support learning at the workplace in academia and industry.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CSEE
• Authors: Eric Ras, Jörg Rech
• Keywords: CSEE 2008, Experience, Knowledge Acquisition, Project's Learning Goals, Software Engineering