Domain Testing: Divide and Conquer - Testing Education

other was a performance test that required them to apply what they had learned to
an actual computer program. As before, both the posttests were open book. The
learners had access to the reference materials, lecture slides, exercises and the
exercise answer key, along with their own solutions to the exercises. Learners were
required to fill out questionnaires after the end of each training day.
Every training day except the first day was split into two sessions. There
was a morning session followed by a lunch break and the afternoon session. Lunch
breaks lasted for approximately an hour. Caffeinated and carbonated drinks were
also served after lunch breaks each training day and during pretests and posttests.
After the completion of this experiment, it was realized that the experiment
unfortunately had a blunder associated with one of the instructional objectives. This
is discussed further in section 5.06. It was then decided to correct this error and
conduct another round of training sessions using five more learners. The first round
of experiments is classified as Experiment 1 and the latter round as Experiment 2.
5.02 Instructional Review Board
Any research at Florida Tech involving human subjects requires approval from
Florida Tech’s instructional review board (IRB). If the research meets certain
criteria, which mine did, it may be exempted by the IRB. Before conducting the
experiments, I submitted an application to the IRB requesting exemption from IRB
review. The application was approved. (See Appendix T.)
5.03 Finding Test Subjects
Flyers and e-mail invitations to open e-mail forums were used to obtain test
subjects. Appendix V contains the flyer that was first used to advertise the training
sessions. The content of the e-mail invitations was identical to the display flyer.
The prerequisites for undergoing this training were successful completion of a
discrete math course and at least two programming languages courses. It was also
required that the learners had never taken a software testing course before.
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