Integrating Code Reviews into Online Lessons to Support Software Engineering Education

The use of peer code review exercises is well established in software engineering education. Nevertheless, challenges involving students' ability to perform code reviews have been identified as barriers to successfully integrating code reviews in educational settings. We have previously proposed code review notebooks as a way to address this issue. Code review notebooks resemble computational notebooks but focus on reviewing rather than executing code and can serve to introduce students to the code review process. In this study, we evaluated the effects of using a code review notebook via a case study whereby 25 university students were taught how to identify code style issues in JavaScript. Our mixed-method analysis suggests that the code review notebook format encourages students to reflect on their learning process and can result in short-term learning gains. These findings could serve instructors looking to incorporate code review exercises into their practice.