What We Learned From 92 Students in a Spanish Software Class

A 2021 study at Seville University involved 92 third-year software engineering students, revealing gender imbalances and technical dropouts across test groups.


This content originally appeared on HackerNoon and was authored by Pair Programming AI Agent

Abstract and 1 Introduction

1.1 The twincode platform

1.2 Pilot Studies

1.3 Other Gender Identities and 1.4 Structure of the Paper

2 Related Work

3 Original Study (Seville Dec, 2021) and 3.1 Participants

3.2 Experiment Execution

3.3 Factors (Independent Variables)

3.4 Response Variables (Dependent Variables)

3.5 Confounding Variables

3.6 Data Analysis

4 First Replication (Berkeley May, 2022)

4.1 Participants

4.2 Experiment Execution

4.3 Data Analysis

5 Discussion and Threats to Validity and 5.1 Operationalization of the Cause Construct — Treatment

5.2 Operationalization of the Effect Construct — Metrics

5.3 Sampling the Population — Participants

6 Conclusions and Future Work

6.1 Replication in Different Cultural Background

6.2 Using Chatbots as Partners and AI-based Utterance Coding

Datasets, Compliance with Ethical Standards, Acknowledgements, and References

A. Questionnaire #1 and #2 response items

B. Evolution of the twincode User Interface

C. User Interface of tag-a-chat

3 Original Study (Seville Dec, 2021)

In this section, the original study carried out at the University of Seville in December 2021 is reported, including most of the experimental settings which are in common with the external replication performed at the UC Berkeley in May 2022, reported in Section 4.

3.1 Participants

In the original study carried out at the University of Seville in December 2021, the participants were third-year students of the Degree in Software Engineering enrolled in any of the three groups of the Requirements Engineering course taught in Spanish[3]. The final number of valid[4] subjects was 92, arranged in 46 pairs. Only 9 students could not finish the study because of technical problems during the tasks. Considering the 92 valid subjects, 15 identified as woman (16.30%), 1 as non-binary (1.09%), and the rest as man (82.61%) during the registration process.

\ Table 3 Summary of primary studies on gender and pair programming in chronological order

\ Note that, although the percentage of women is low, it is above the average percentage in the Degree in Software Engineering at the University of Seville, which unfortunately is close to 11% according to the last academic year official statistics [59]. Note also that, due to the 9 students dropped by technical reasons, the percentage of women could not be kept the same in the control (6 women, 14.29%) and experimental (9 women, 19.57%) groups than in the sample (16.30%), which was our initial intention.

\

:::info Authors:

(1) Amador Duran, I3US Institute, Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain and SCORE Lab, Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain (amador@us.es);

(2) Pablo Fernandez, I3US Institute, Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain and SCORE Lab, Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain (pablofm@us.es);

(3) Beatriz Bernardez, I3US Institute, Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain and SCORE Lab, Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain (beat@us.es);

(4) Nathaniel Weinman, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, USA (nweinman@berkeley.edu);

(5) Aslıhan Akalın, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, USA (asliakalin@berkeley.edu);

(6) Armando Fox, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, USA (fox@berkeley.edu).

:::


:::info This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license.

:::

[3] There is a fourth group of the Requirements Engineering course which is taught in English and in which the enrolled students are approximately 50% Spanish and 50% Erasmus students coming from other countries in the European Union (EU) or from non-UE countries like Israel or Georgia. They were not invited to participate in the study because their command of Spanish was not good enough to chat with a randomly assigned classmate, who would have undoubtedly identified them as foreign students.

\ [4] The criteria for considering a subject as valid are strongly dependent on properly performing the experimental tasks, which are described in Section 3.2. The criteria themselves are specified in Section 3.6.


This content originally appeared on HackerNoon and was authored by Pair Programming AI Agent


Print Share Comment Cite Upload Translate Updates
APA

Pair Programming AI Agent | Sciencx (2025-06-23T17:35:03+00:00) What We Learned From 92 Students in a Spanish Software Class. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/06/23/what-we-learned-from-92-students-in-a-spanish-software-class/

MLA
" » What We Learned From 92 Students in a Spanish Software Class." Pair Programming AI Agent | Sciencx - Monday June 23, 2025, https://www.scien.cx/2025/06/23/what-we-learned-from-92-students-in-a-spanish-software-class/
HARVARD
Pair Programming AI Agent | Sciencx Monday June 23, 2025 » What We Learned From 92 Students in a Spanish Software Class., viewed ,<https://www.scien.cx/2025/06/23/what-we-learned-from-92-students-in-a-spanish-software-class/>
VANCOUVER
Pair Programming AI Agent | Sciencx - » What We Learned From 92 Students in a Spanish Software Class. [Internet]. [Accessed ]. Available from: https://www.scien.cx/2025/06/23/what-we-learned-from-92-students-in-a-spanish-software-class/
CHICAGO
" » What We Learned From 92 Students in a Spanish Software Class." Pair Programming AI Agent | Sciencx - Accessed . https://www.scien.cx/2025/06/23/what-we-learned-from-92-students-in-a-spanish-software-class/
IEEE
" » What We Learned From 92 Students in a Spanish Software Class." Pair Programming AI Agent | Sciencx [Online]. Available: https://www.scien.cx/2025/06/23/what-we-learned-from-92-students-in-a-spanish-software-class/. [Accessed: ]
rf:citation
» What We Learned From 92 Students in a Spanish Software Class | Pair Programming AI Agent | Sciencx | https://www.scien.cx/2025/06/23/what-we-learned-from-92-students-in-a-spanish-software-class/ |

Please log in to upload a file.




There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.

You must be logged in to translate posts. Please log in or register.