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On understanding compatibility of student pair programmers

Published: 01 March 2004 Publication History

Abstract

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 compatible with their partners. An extensive study was done at the North Carolina State University to provide guidance on forming student pairs to improve the chances that pairs will be compatible and have a productive work relationship. We examined compatibility among freshman, advanced undergraduate, and graduate students. We have found that the students' perception of their partner's skill level has a significant influence on their compatibility. Graduate students work well with partners of similar actual skill level. Freshmen seem to work better with partners with different Myers Briggs personality type. Students' self-esteem does not appear to be a major contributor to pair compatibility.

References

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
ACM SIGCSE Bulletin  Volume 36, Issue 1
March 2004
501 pages
ISSN:0097-8418
DOI:10.1145/1028174
Issue’s Table of Contents
  • cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGCSE '04: Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
    March 2004
    544 pages
    ISBN:1581137982
    DOI:10.1145/971300
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]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 March 2004
Published in SIGCSE Volume 36, Issue 1

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Author Tags

  1. Myers Briggs
  2. collaboration
  3. compatibility
  4. computer science classroom
  5. pair programming

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