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The study of the relationships between self-regulated learning and formative assessment is an active line of research in the educational community. A recent review of the literature highlights that the study of these connections has been mainly unidirectional, focusing on how formative assessment helps students to self-regulate their learning, being much less explored the effect of self-regulated learning strategies on formative assessment. In this context, analyzing automatically captured students’ activities within online learning tools can provide us further insights on the interactions between these two topics. More specifically, this article examines the activity traces of 382 students who used an online tool to learn a programming language. The tool incorporates review exercises for promoting self-assessment (an important self-regulated learning strategy). Furthermore, the tool is used in supervised laboratories where students receive formative assessment. This study uses process mining techniques to analyze the temporal component of student behavior in both types of activities, their interaction, and how self-assessment relates to formative assessment. Some key lessons are learned: 1) activities promoting self-assessment significantly improved students’ involvement in formative assessment activities; and 2) increasing self-assessment cannot compensate for a lack of effort in formative assessment. We also underline that, to the best of our knowledge, to date no research has used process mining to consider the time component in the analysis of the relationships between formative assessment and self-assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contribution: Internships designed to provide training and an initial period of contact with industry, prior to a computer science engineering capstone project, have a very positive impact on both industry and academic capstone projects. Background: Internships and capstone projects are widely used to integrate work-related learning in computer engineering curricula. Both activities offer numerous benefits for students, industry, and academia. Although their effects have been extensively studied separately, the interaction between them remains unexplored. Research Questions: What is the effect of internships on the development of a subsequent capstone project? Methodology: The hypothesis was that the completion of an internship will have positive effects on several aspects of the capstone projects: 1) improved student competencies; 2) improved capstone project outcomes; and 3) decreased supervision effort. Further, these positive effects were expected to be greater in industry-based projects than in academic projects. The hypothesis was tested through a quantitative study of data collected from 274 computer science engineering capstone projects. A period of time with internships was compared with another period without internships, and differentiating between academic and industry projects. Findings: Internships prior to capstone projects improve student skills in autonomy, technology, methodology, and project management; increase the complexity and technological novelty of the resulting projects; and reduce advisor involvement in practical (technology, execution) and keep-the-project-alive issues, and increase advisor involvement in monitoring student work (meetings, reports, and initial arrangements). This effect was observed in both industrial and academic projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In carrying out their capstone projects, students use knowledge and skills acquired throughout their degree program to create a product or provide a technical service. An assigned advisor guides the students and supervises the work, and a committee assesses the projects. This study compares student and staff perceptions of key aspects of completing this type of project, such as project characteristics, student competencies, advisor involvement, and student perceived learning. The primary finding of this study is that the students' expectations differ greatly from those of staff. In particular, students tend to have a better opinion of their project, their competencies, and the supervision received than does the staff. However, advisors and evaluation committees have a similar opinion about projects characteristics. The students' perception of their learning, furthermore, is not always consistent with the grade obtained or student satisfaction. This disagreement suggests the need to more clearly and effectively communicate actual expectations to students and staff. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]