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Scaffolding to Improve Writing Skills in a Computer Science Literacy

Course

Wu He, Harris Wu, Li XuDepartment of Information Technology and Decision Sciences

{whe, hwu, lxu}@odu.edu

Kurt Maly Department of Computer Science

Old Dominion UniversityNorfolk, USA

maly@cs.odu.edu

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AgendaIntroductionBackgroundApproach and Class ExperimentResultsConclusion and Future Work

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IntroductionWriting has been recognized as an important

skill in the technology field. Many IT and CS students lack sufficient

technical writing skillsSocial media and new technologies such as

blog may be effective for today’s generation of students to improve their writing skills

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Background Bruner (1978) describes scaffolding as:

... the steps taken to reduce the degrees of freedom taken in carrying out some task so that the child can concentrate on the difficult skill she is in the process of acquiring.

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Class ExperimentCS150 “Computers in Society” open to all

students at Old Dominion university, typically juniors

Assignments include individually writing a blog, participating in a group wiki, and writing a research paper

Different groups have different ordering of the due dates of these major assignments

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Experiment Setup: Ordering of Assignments

Group Assign. 1 Assign. 2 Assign. 3

1 Wiki Blog * Paper

2 Wiki Blog * Paper

3 Wiki Blog * Paper

4 Paper Blog+ Wiki

5 Blog Paper Wiki

6 Paper Blog * Wiki

* Blog is overlapping with 1st week of Paper cycle

+ Blog is overlapping with 2nd week of Paper cycle

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Sample Evaluation Rubric

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Sample results: Wiki scores before/after scaffolded paper

before Paper after Paper

Mean wiki score 13.09617834 13.10964912

Variance 2.740754532 2.924303406

Observations 157 171

Pooled Variance 2.836470202

P(T<=t) one-tail 0.471178836 (not significant)

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Evaluation

The quantitative results do not show a significant impact of scaffolding in individual paper assignment on the subsequent group wiki assignment

However, the student feedback in end-of-semester evaluations strongly indicated that scaffolding indeed helped improve their writing.

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Thank YouQuestions and suggestions?

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