On the Role of Learning Theories in Furthering Software Engineering Education

Background: Learning Theories

To provide some background for our discussion on the role of learning theories in software engineering education, in this section we will briefly introduce the set of learning theories that we surveyed for the purposes of our analysis. We do not include here an exhaustive list of all learning theories with significant detail. Instead, the purpose of this section is to simply introduce some of the ones we have seen software engineering educational approaches centered around most frequently, and provide pointers to where more information about each one can be found. In addition, we will also briefly touch on implications and typical or possible applications of each theory for software engineering education.

We chose the particular set of learning theories discussed here because of two criteria: relevancy to software engineering and orthogonality among the factors defining the theory. In other words, these theories are the ones we have seen to be most clearly and/or frequently embodied in the software engineering educational approaches that we surveyed. Furthermore, there exists a great deal of overlap among learning theories, and there are several learning theories that encompass a number of others. In these cases, we either group theories that have the same basic idea, and omit those that simply combine a number of theories.