Workplace scenarios to integrate communication skills and content

Abstract

A recent study of new software developers at Microsoft reveals the significance and integration of communication skills in their daily tasks. While the literature offers a variety of approaches to promote the integration of communication skills into the Computer Science curriculum, a discrepancy remains between what students get and what they need. In this paper, we propose using workplace scenarios that integrate communication skills with technical content situated in and mediating workplace activity. Workplace scenarios are based on an analysis of the workplace as an activity system. Guidelines for implementing workplace scenarios are provided. A case study analyzes the integration of communication skills with technical content using workplace scenarios in a software development course.

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

“…Learning the genres of a field is equivalent to learning how specialists in the field think and do their work [7]. Another line of reasoning has emphasized the value of creating scenarios in which students need to convey the results of their technical work to the people who would need to use the results to complete their own work [5,6,17]. The two approaches overlap and reinforce each other.…”

“…Genres are recognized as a conventional way of addressing recurring communication needs in ways that guide writers and meet readers' needs [9,11]. Scenarios involve the need to communicate specific information from particular technical work to the specific persons who need to use it [17]. Instruction using both genres and scenarios is part of legitimate peripheral participation or situated learning [21], a pedagogical technique where students engage with materials in similar ways that they might in industry [2,5].…”

“…However, Burge, et al, [6] found that only 37% of CS/SE undergraduate programs, out of 104 analyzed, required a stand-alone communication course and that less than 15% indicated a strong emphasis on writing skills in technical courses other than software engineering (54%) and the capstone (73%). Several CS/SE specific frameworks for incorporating communication interventions into courses and curricula have been proposed [6,8,12,17,20]. In these frameworks, assignment development utilizes situated learning, where technical tasks are framed within audience-driven workplace scenarios [2,17,20].…”

“…Several CS/SE specific frameworks for incorporating communication interventions into courses and curricula have been proposed [6,8,12,17,20]. In these frameworks, assignment development utilizes situated learning, where technical tasks are framed within audience-driven workplace scenarios [2,17,20]. The reader requires the technical communication to complete a task.…”

Evaluating the Collaboration between a Software Project Management Course and a Software Development Course in Terms of Student Learning and Experience

“…Student teams make weekly presentations for the first 5 weeks and product demos at the end of each Scrum cycle. Students regularly report the results of their work using several workplace genres to a variety of audiences [7]. In the semester during which we performed the study, there were two sections of this course with 34 students total-16 students in one of the sections and 18 students in the other.…”