학술논문

CS/SE Instructors Can Improve Student Writing without Reducing Class Time Devoted to Technical Content: Experimental Results
Document Type
Conference
Source
2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering Software Engineering (ICSE), 2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on. 2:455-464 May, 2015
Subject
Computing and Processing
General Topics for Engineers
Writing
Software testing
Software engineering
Employment
Programming
Education
communication across the curriculum
software engineering education
black box test plans
Language
ISSN
0270-5257
1558-1225
Abstract
The Computer Science and Software Engineering (CS/SE) profession reports that new college graduates lack the communication skills needed for personal and organizational success. Many CS/SE faculty may omit communication instruction from their courses because they do not want to reduce technical content. We experimented in a software-engineering-intensive second-semester programming course with strategies for improving students' writing of black box test plans that included no instruction on writing the plans beyond the standard lecture on testing. The treatment version of the course used 1) a modified assignment that focused on the plan's readers, 2) a model plan students could consult online, and 3) a modified grading rubric that identified the readers' needs. Three external raters found that students in the treatment sections outperformed students in the control sections on writing for five of nine criteria on rubrics for evaluating the plans and on the raters' holistic impression of the students' technical and communication abilities from the perspectives of a manager and a tester.