Shall we write?

A transversal model for learning and teaching writing skills in ICT engineering degrees

“…These generally tried to improve the communication competences of their students through explicit evaluation of different aspects of writing in some or all of the subjects within their computing curricula. Along these lines, initial works like [3] that collect and classify such pilot schemes deserve to be highlighted, as do the classifications and taxonomies of [4], [5] and [6]. Among the authors that describe and analyze their own experience, [7], [8], [9], [10] and [11] should be mentioned.…”

Bridging writing to learn and writing in the discipline in computer science education

“…A number of educators have responded to an institutional mandate for writing intensive courses [2,14] or writing embedded across a broad range of courses [8]. Standards, such as Computing Curricula 2001 (CC2001) [1], recommend writing as an important communication skill; several educators acknowledge this as their primary motivation [2,3,6,10,17,19]. Beyond institutional mandates, standards, and accreditation requirements, several educators have justified writing on its own merits as a critically important professional skill [2,3,6,8,12,14,17,20,24].…”

“…Professional writing is typically represented by documents written by software professionals, such as a software design document [2,10,15], or instructions or user manuals [2,6,14,19], that are a natural component of courses in software development.…”

“…Academic writing includes term papers [24], research papers [3,16], reviews which "summarize, analyze, and/or critique research articles" [9,23,24], and short analytical and evaluative assignments [2,10]. WTC in both forms is discipline-oriented (i.e., based on formal, standard formats) and clearly supports the recommendation of CC2001, "students in computer science programs should be able to communicate ideas effectively in written form" [1].…”

“…In addition to Hartman's dissatisfaction with poor student writing, Anewalt's response to being assigned a writing intensive course, and Ladd and Van Wyk's metaphor, others invoke WAC as a effective strategy to promote writing [10], and use it as a justification for the inclusion of writing in Computer Science courses [14,16,21]. Given WAC's historic status as a movement for general pedagogical reform through the promotion of writing, and particularly in its promotion of "writing to learn" strategies that remain foreign to most Computer Science educators, we briefly review WAC's 30 year history to shed some light on how writing has been, and might be, used in Computer Science education.…”