Mindset for Software Architecture Students

Software architecture students need to believe that they can change their abilities in order to become proficient with software architecture design. Addressing students’ beliefs about their capabilities introduces the realm of mindset. This paper reports about a survey that we conducted in a large university to study a set of factors associated with the students’ mindset. The study found that the students’ mindsets weakly correlates with their cognitive levels and are associated with their expectations from the course. In addition, it found that the students who prefer practicing software architecture have more open mindset than the ones who prefer quizzes. The findings provide new knowledge about the connections between the mindsets of the students, their perception of software architecture, and their approach to learning software architecture practices. The results could be used to design intervention strategies to improve the ability of the students to learn software architecture