Improving Student Engagement and Performance in Computing Final Year Projects

There has been a seismic shift in the UK higher education landscape during the last decade. This has been driven by the formation of the Office for Students (OfS) and the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), where the emphasis has been on programmes offering students higher value when it comes to employability, retention and overall student experience. One of the critical challenges that impacts student experience is being able to enhance student engagement within a learning environment. Final year individual projects, which are generally unstructured in nature, is a significant contributor to programmes of study, yet remains an area where this problem is exacerbated. In an attempt to address this issue, our earlier work lays the foundation for a teaching & learning framework covering computing final year projects. In this paper, we present an extension to the framework and its implementation in 2016/17 following its first trial run within a Computer Science department at a UK university in 2015/16. We discuss the two implementations in practice and provide operational guidance. A large-scale longitudinal empirical study considering the performance of 625 final year undergraduate students over a period of five years is presented to ascertain the effectiveness of the framework. The study finds a consistent and significant positive impact on both student performance and engagement as a result of the original framework and further gains from the enhancements.