CS/SE Instructors Can Improve Student Writing without Reducing Class Time Devoted to Technical Content: Experimental Results

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.