Panel Session: Writing in CS
Writing in CS: Why and How?
Mia Minnes (Moderator)
Computer Science and Engineering
University of California, San Diego
minnes@ucsd.edu
Stephanie R Taylor
Computer Science
Colby College
srtaylor@colby.edu
KEYWORDS
Writing, professional development, communication, curriculum
design, assessment.
ACM Reference Format:
Mia Minnes (Moderator), Bruce Maxwell, Stephanie R Taylor, and Phillip
Barry. 2018. Writing in CS: Why and How?. In SIGCSE ’18: The 49th ACM
Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, February 21–24, 2018,
Baltimore , MD, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.
1145/3159450.3159620
1 SUMMARY
The importance of written communication and critical thinking
in Computer Science is widely acknowledged. It was called out
specifically in the curriculum guidelines ACM CS2013 [6] and has
been the topic of a number of previous SIGCSE papers, for example
[1–4]. Moreover, writing as a pedagogical practice can help make
CS more accessible for a broader population. However, special chal-
lenges may arise for students who are English-language learners
or have writing-specific learning differences.
In this panel, we share our experiences teaching Writing in CS
and, in particular, leveraging resources from writing experts to ad-
dress these opportunities and challenges. The panelists come from
both a private liberal arts college and two large public research-
intensive universities. We will share how we have engaged in writ-
ing in different ways: large-scale curricular development designed
to incorporate “writing to learn" in an entire undergraduate pro-
gram vs. a specific writing-intensive non-technical class where
students explore professional development. A common theme of
our experiences is that connecting with colleagues across cam-
pus, specifically experts in writing pedagogy, can give computer
scientists both the confidence and the language with which to
meaningfully teach writing in our own context.
During the panel, we’ll share our motivations for bringing writ-
ing into the classroom, outline the nuts and bolts of how to do so
without massively increasing the load on teachers and students, and
give strategies for assessing the results. We will solicit contributions
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SIGCSE ’18, February 21–24, 2018, Baltimore , MD, USA
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ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5103-4/18/02.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3159450.3159620
402
SIGCSE’18, February 21-24, 2018, Baltimore, MD, USA
Bruce Maxwell
Computer Science
Colby College
bmaxwell@colby.edu
Phillip Barry
Computer Science and Engineering
University of Minnesota
barry@cs.umn.edu
from participants about where and how writing is incorporated in
their courses, and field questions.
2 MIA MINNES
Myths about CS and engineering sometimes obscure the essential
role of writing and communication in CS. In light of this, how do
we motivate our students to devote time and energy to developing
effective communication and writing skills? In my professional
development course at UC San Diego, students write informally
on a weekly basis while they are working full-time at summer
internships. They write about technical accomplishments, about
interpersonal struggles and successes, and about how they see
themselves progressing on their professional journey. The weekly
reflections are shared with peers working at other CS internships.
In this course, writing serves both as a vehicle for learning and
as one of its key subjects. The course takes place while students
are off-campus, spread across many states (and countries). The
online written discussion forum is an essential component of the
communal learning space. Moreover, many of the topics discussed
in the course focus on professional communication itself: why
it’s important, what are common pitfalls, and what are strategies
for improving it. By teaching these concepts in an authentic and
immediately relevant setting (while students need to work with
managers and co-workers), it becomes easier to get student buy-in.
Students are developing their written communication while seeing
why this is useful.
A complementary goal for this course, in addition to improving
students’ writing proficiency, is to help students recognize and ap-
preciate the connections between their on-campus coursework and
real-world applications in which they are engaging during their
internships. Analyzing samples of student writing from the begin-
ning and the end of the summer revealed that, indeed, students’
writing demonstrated greater depth of integrative learning [5]. In
collaboration with the UC San Diego Writing + Critical Expression
Hub, I’ve been able to sharpen the focus of writing assignments
and identify key lessons for the students.
3 BRUCE MAXWELL
Communication and writing is an important skill for computer sci-
entists in both academia and industry. The CS Department at Colby
College has integrated writing into weekly projects for the past
decade, primarily by requiring brief written reports for all of our
weekly assignments in our core sequence. The sequence includes
Panel Session: Writing in CS
Introductory Computer Science, Data Structures and Algorithms,
Data Analysis and Visualization, and Programming Languages. In
addition, all faculty have required some form of presentation and
writing in our 400-level capstone experience courses. However,
despite believing the writing to be an important part of the assign-
ment, we had only a rough idea of what we wanted from student
writing, and it was difficult to help students improve.
After discussions with our own Writing Center, we partnered
with the University of Minnesota to implement their Writing En-
riched Curriculum (WEC) concept. The overall process had us ex-
amine and identify the types of writing we wanted our students to
undertake, clearly state what constituted good writing, and iden-
tify a coherent progression within our curriculum so that students
went through beginner, intermediate, and advanced writing tasks.
Having to describe to a non computer scientist the types of writing
we felt were important was a challenging, but worthwhile exercise.
It helped us to understand and focus our attention on the skills we
believed were the most important.
The outcome of this process was a set of clear and unambiguous
statements of both the types of writing, and what constituted good
writing for each type. For example, we identified five types of
writing–persuasive, descriptive, explanatory, analytic, and code–
along with specific qualities of good writing in each category. These
descriptions helped us to build a comprehensive plan for integrating
writing throughout the curriculum.
4 STEPHANIE TAYLOR
I worked closely with the Writing Center and others in the depart-
ment to develop a plan for students to develop the writing skills
we identifed earlier in the WEC process. We started by identifying
where in the curriculum they should work on each skill, and at what
level. One goal was to ensure that students experienced beginner
and intermediate level writing expectations and exercises before
being expected to undertake more advanced writing. Another goal
was to develop a teaching plan and other materials based on our
writing types and rubrics to enable us to teach the relevant skills
and clearly communicate to students our expectations.
Our implementation is based on short writing lessons to supple-
ment the writing accompanying every coding project. Briefly, each
programming assignment involves a blog-style report that summa-
rizes the project’s coding and non-coding goals. For example, if a
project has students use the Python turtle to draw a picture, the
written report involves a description of the elements in the picture
along with the coding approaches used to create those elements,
such as for loops. The students also reflect on what they learned.
The short writing lessons focus on specific aspects of the re-
ports, such as the summary, or how well they integrate text and
pictures or text and code. These lessons are strategically placed in
the semester so students can reflect on their prior report and see
improvement on their next report. The lessons also recur, with in-
creasing sophistication, as students move through the progression
of core courses. Students see each topic twice, in different courses,
to emphasize and strengthen prior experience.
A key factor in the success of the writing lessons is giving feed-
back that is timely, relevant to the skill being learned, and avoids
correcting grammar and fine details. In addition, we have to be able
403
SIGCSE’18, February 21-24, 2018, Baltimore, MD, USA
to train student graders to provide feedback on writing. Design-
ing clear rubrics that we can communicate to students, graders,
and faculty has been critical, and we are seeing clear evidence of
improvement in student writing in the context of project reports.
5 PHILLIP BARRY
Many of the challenges of teaching writing in CS involve assess-
ment. How effective is students’ writing in a given class? How good
are students’ written communication skills once they complete their
degree? How proficiently do we teach writing in a given class? How
proficiently do we teach it in our entire curriculum?
The Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the
University of Minnesorta has been a participant in the university’s
WEC (Writing Enriched Curriculum) program for over five years.
Our WEC activities involving assessment include the following:
• Faculty discussions of where writing occurs in our curricu-
lum. In particular, this helped us identify "writing gaps" and
the need to emphasize writing more in our introductory
classes.
• Faculty discussions of rating criteria for student writing in
general. These criteria are used in writing instruction, in
grading rubrics, and in programmatic evaluations of writing.
• Experimenting with different practices that give students
feedback for revision.
• Development of grading rubrics for certain writing assign-
ments.
• Training material for teaching assistants in large, writing-
heavy classes. Because of of our large class sizes, teaching
assistants play an important role in assessing writing, and
therefore need special training.
• Assessment and revision of various key writing assignments.
• Formal ratings of student writing samples. Every three years
the WEC program has a formal rating of student work that
provides a variety of feedback to the department.
Most of these are ongoing activities in the sense that we have
made some progress, are analyzing their effectiveness, and are work-
ing to improve them. In particular, three keys themes in our WEC
activities are (1) the use of assessment data in improving writing
instruction and activities; (2) the variety of different types of assess-
ment and assessment-related activities; and (3) writing assessment
as a fertile area for discussion within our department, with other
departments and centers — such as the Center for Writing — at the
University of Minnesota, and with colleagues at other institutions.
REFERENCES
[1] Alan Garvey. 2010. Writing in an Upper-level CS Course. In SIGCSE ’10.
[2] Mark E. Hoffman, Timothy Dansdill, and David S. Herscovici. 2006. Bridging
Writing to Learn and Writing in the Discipline in Computer Science Education.
In SIGCSE ’06.
[3] Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk. 2003. A Technical Writing Class for Computer Science
Majors: Measuring Student Perceptions of Learning. In SIGCSE ’03.
[4] David G. Kay. 1998. Computer Scientists Can Teach Writing: An Upper Division
Course for Computer Science Majors. In SIGCSE ’98.
[5] Mia Minnes, John Mayberry, Melissa Soto, and Jace Hargis. in press. Practice
Makes Deeper? Regular Reflective Writing During Engineering Internships. Jour-
nal of Transformative Learning (in press).
[6] ACM-IEEE Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula. 2013. Computer Science
Curricula 2013: Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in
Computer Science.