Students Perceptions of Authentic Learning for Learning Information Flow Analysis

This research-to-practice paper reports students' perceptions on using a teaching framework called authentic learning to learn about information flow analysis. Using information flow analysis, practitioners find the flow of data across one or multiple programs. Information flow analysis is helpful for multiple software engineering activities, such as detecting software bugs and developing software fuzzing techniques. Despite being helpful in practice, learning about information flow analysis remains an impediment for students, which in turn prevents them from reaping the benefits of using information flow analysis. Therefore, an application of a teaching framework can aid students in learning about information flow analysis. To that end, we systematically investigate if authentic learning—a teaching framework that emphasizes on providing hands on experience for a practically relevant topic—is helpful for students to learn about information flow analysis. Upon conducting the exercise, students are asked to participate in a survey where they report perceptions about the conducted exercise. We analyze data from 170 students who were introduced to information flow analysis through an authentic learning-based exercise. From our analysis, we observe: (i) majority of the students to have little to no knowledge about information flow analysis prior to conducting the authentic learning-based exercise; (ii) 74.1% of the 170 students find the authentic learning-based exercise helpful to learn about information flow analysis; and (iii) student perceptions to vary for the three components of the authentic learning-based exercise. We conclude our paper by describing the implications of our findings for instructors and researchers. For example, instructors should consider the education level of students while designing activities for individual authentic learning components to educate students on information flow analysis. Furthermore, researchers can devise strategies on how instructors can allocate their efforts for each authentic learning component through empirical studies. These studies may investigate the correlation between reported helpfulness and socio-technical factors, such as education level of students.