  Software Engineering as an industry is highly diverse in terms of development
methods and practices. Practitioners employ a myriad of methods and tend to
further tailor them by e.g. omitting some practices or rules. This diversity in
development methods poses a challenge for software engineering education,
creating a gap between education and industry. General theories such as the
Essence Theory of Software Engineering can help bridge this gap by presenting
software engineering students with higher-level frameworks upon which to build
an understanding of software engineering methods and practical project work. In
this paper, we study Essence in an educational setting to evaluate its
usefulness for software engineering students while also investigating barriers
to its adoption in this context. To this end, we observe 102 student teams
utilize Essence in practical software engineering projects during a semester
long, project-based course.
