POGIL-like Learning in Undergraduate Software Testing and DevOps - A Pilot Study

Process Oriented Guided Inquiry-based Learning (POGIL) is an active learning pedagogy that emphasizes process skills in addition to content, and has been shown to improve student learning outcomes in various STEM disciplines. We developed 4 POGIL-like activities for unit testing, integration testing and continuous integration, in software engineering. We delineate one of the activities in this paper, and explain how we implemented our POGIL-like pedagogy in the classroom. We measured student success through a cognitive pre- and post-course survey for those topics, and found significant increases in score correctness gains. We also document and hypothesize reasons for the cognitive gains from the POGIL-like pedagogy.