Benefits and Drawbacks of a Graduate Course: An Experience Teaching Systematic Literature Review
Anderson Yoshiaki Iwazaki, Vinicius dos Santos, Katia Romero, Felizardo, /'Erica Ferreira de Souza, Natasha M. C. Valentim, Elisa Yumi, Nakagawa

TL;DR
This paper shares an experience teaching a systematic literature review course to graduate students, highlighting its benefits, challenges, and key topics, based on a decade-long survey of student outcomes and instructor insights.
Contribution
It provides an empirical evaluation of the benefits and drawbacks of SLR courses for graduate students and offers recommendations for effective teaching strategies.
Findings
SLR courses enhance students' research skills and literature review capabilities
Students perceive SLR courses as valuable for academic development
Teaching SLR involves specific challenges for educators
Abstract
Graduate courses can provide specialized knowledge for Ph.D. and Master's students and contribute to develop their hard and soft skills. At the same time, Systematic Literature Review (SLR) has been increasingly adopted in the computing area as a valuable technique to synthesize the state of the art of a given research topic. However, there is still a poor understanding of the real benefits and drawbacks of offering the SLR course for graduate students. This paper reports an experience that examines such benefits and drawbacks, the difficulties for professors (i.e., educators), and the essential SLR topics to be taught as well as a way to better teach them. We also surveyed computer science graduate students who attended the SLR course, which we have offered for almost ten years for Ph.D. and Master's students in our institution. We found the attendance to the SLR course is a valuable…
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Taxonomy
TopicsScientific Computing and Data Management · Online Learning and Analytics · Software Engineering Research
