ABSTRACT
Context: Software Engineering students are often excellent developers although they may occasionally encounter difficulties with certain tasks such as conceptual modeling, in which mental clarity plays an essential role. With several years of experience in practicing mindfulness (a meditation technique that calms the mind to see with clarity), we hypothesize that several weeks of continued mindfulness practice may increase the performance of students regarding conceptual modeling since the proven benefits of mindfulness include increased concentration and mental clarity. In order to ascertain this hypothesis, a family of controlled experiments, involving 130 students, has been carried out at the University of Seville over three consecutive academic years. Subsequent to the analysis of the individual experiments, a meta-analysis was conducted.
Aim: This chapter helps understand how various datasets have been generated and traces their evolution across the family of experiments and the resulting meta-analysis. Not only does the process include the integration of datasets into a single target dataset with the complete set of data, but it also improves the structure of the dataset and adapts it to several statistical analysis tools.
Method: Data collection was manually carried out during the individual experiments by means of gathering the scores of the students attained in conceptual modeling exercises. In order to obtain the complete but also simple dataset of the family of experiments, certain dataset columns were necessarily selected and renamed. New relevant information was also added to form a conclusive meta-analysis. The dataset was adapted to the type and format of SPSS for the execution of a further analysis, complementary to the main study in R. The MetaMind dataset is the set of datasets involved in the present research. The MetaMind dataset has become a helpful resource for the independent reproducibility of the results, to ascertain the evolution of the process across a family of experiments, and to enable external replications of the controlled experiment.
