Thinking, speaking, and writing for freshmen

• Authors: Lawrence J. Osborne
• Venue: Proceedings of the 37th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
• Year: 2006

Our entering freshmen have little experience with the underlying concepts of computer science and information technology, and they are not familiar with the process of absorbing new information through listening and reading and cooperating with other well-trained individuals to increase their knowledge and skills in a subject. Simply making group assignments requiring research papers and presentations does not enable students to appreciate this process which is a characteristic of all fields of scientific inquiry today. Most of our upper division courses have team projects, but student culture resists effective teamwork. We have established a course for freshman entitled "Thinking, Speaking, and Writing in Computer Science" in which we try to lay the groundwork for group work in later classes by fostering a sense of interdependence among team members, accountability of individual students to the team in the form of preparation and completion of project tasks, frequent meetings to promote team goals, the development of social skills required for collaboration, and the value of group discussion of strategies in problem solving. Although the course has been in existence only two years, our department has observed that students are finding that following this approach to learning leads to improved academic performance, and that students are becoming more adept in learning skills as they realize the benefits that accrue from our approach to intelligent interaction with their peers and instructors.