Open Collections

Allen, Meghan Elizabeth

University of British Columbia

While communication skills, including technical writing skills, are important for professional computer scientists’ career success, they may not be explicitly addressed within undergraduate computer science education and there is dearth of scholarship exploring students' experiences of learning these skills. Understanding how technical writing skills are learned in post-secondary computer science programs could inform better curricular and pedagogical approaches for teaching these skills, thereby equipping students with competencies necessary for their future careers. More specifically, there is a need for research on undergraduate computer science students’ perspectives of what technical writing skills they are learning, how they are learning them, and how they experience this learning. This study was designed to answer three research questions: - RQ1: How do students describe their experiences learning and doing technical writing with others? What are their reflections on these experiences? - RQ2: In what ways do students hold perspectives that may be barriers to their learning of technical writing? - RQ3: How do course assessment practices affect students' learning of technical writing? To answer these research questions, I conducted an interpretive qualitative study, grounded in Lave and Wenger’s Situated Learning Theory and Social Theory of Learning. Ten third- and fourth-year computer science students participated. I collected data via reflective journal writing and beginning-of-term and end-of-term interviews to gather a deep view into the student experience. I followed Braun and Clarke's method of reflexive thematic analysis to generate themes from the data corpus. I found that computer science students' communities of practice influence their learning of technical writing in many and varied ways, that students hold nuanced perspectives about technical writing in computer science, and that course assessment practices affect the learning activities that students prioritize.

Text

2024-08-12

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88925

Curriculum Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/