Louise Dennis: Teaching Portfolio

Diversity

There are two main issues surrounding diversity that affect Computer Science at Nottingham. One is diversity in programming ability, both at intake and throughout the degrees and the other is the cultural diversity introduced through the recruitment of large numbers of foreign non-native English speakers into the student body.

Programming Ability

The issue of teaching programming to undergraduates has, in recent years, become of widespread concern throughout the sector. The gap between student ability and staff expectations appears to have widened dramatically over the past decade. This would appear to be attributable to a number of causes. Firstly, Computer Science is a young discipline. There are lecturers in nearly all Computer Science departments who started their careers before it was a recognised discipline and many more who have migrated to Computer Science having started their career in another area such as Mathematics, Engineering or Psychology. While this creates a welcome diversity in staff interests, skills, expertise and perspectives it does mean that most staff members taught themselves to program and find it very hard to identify with the experience of being taught to program. In fact, by and large, most staff intuitively expect students not only to be able to teach themselves programming but to be enthusiastic about programming and to find it straightforward. The provision of lectures and problem classes have therefore been regarded as useful but not vital additions to that process. It seems that increasingly this is not the student perspective. Hence the expectation that the staff role is primarily one of trouble-shooting has become outdated.

Even leaving aside the fact that most members of staff are self-taught programmers, for years it was reasonable to expect the majority of students to be able to program at intake. Before the 1990s computer science was a subject largely taken by school leavers with a pre-existing enthusiasm for computers and, at the time, experience with computers almost invariably involved some sort of programming work.

In the 1990s not only did computers become a tool which you could use far more easily without any programming experience (through the development of the Windows Operating System and the Office suite of programs) but the rise of the Internet meant that Computer Science became a much more attractive degree subject for students who were not already deeply engrossed by the technology itself. More and more computer science departments found they were recruiting students who perceived computer science as a glamourous route to vast wealth but who did not necessarily have any background or interest in the technical aspects of the technology. It gradually became clear that a style of teaching which presupposed programming ability or at least the ability and inclination to self-teach was inappropriate for this new more diverse intake.

The resulting problems are still unresolved and a topic of research ([Jenkins, 01] provides a good summary of the problems and suggests paths forward), in particular in the learning technology group at Nottingham. On a personal level I have found I need to question many facts or processes that appear completely obvious to me and to tease them out into their constituent parts and dependencies and at the same time to focus more on presenting the process by which a program is constructed rather than the syntactic tools provided by an individual language.

Paradoxically recruitment is now falling across the sector, probably triggered by the dot com crash and a depression in the IT sector and it may be that the subject is returning to a situation when we can maintain much higher expectations of our students prior exposure to or motivation for programming at intake.

Non-native English Speakers/ Cultural Diversity

The recruitment of a large number of non-native English speakers has a wide impact in all aspects of teaching and learning. Whatever our aspirations and the quality controls we place on intake requirements, a significant minority of these people do not have a grasp of English that is adequate for many day-to-day aspects of study such as understanding verbal instructions about administrative processes (when and where to register, who to speak to about module choice, how to log on to computers etc.) this generates problems when advising these students - particularly critical is a tendency to miss the inclusion of the word "not" or "don't" in instructions with obvious implications for their understanding of the advice they have been given and their ability to follow it. While this may sound trivial even a week's delay in accessing the university computer systems can have a profound affect on these students' ability to study effectively.

Allied to these problems with comprehension is a tendency not to reveal when instructions have been insufficient or not well understood. Obviously a part of this is a natural unwillingness to reveal lack of understanding but in some cases it seems to be allied with a cultural attitude where it is considered to impolite to ask a tutor for further clarification since this suggests they have been incompetent in supplying an explanation. This creates an extra obstacle for a tutor in assessing whether such students have adequately understood the instructions they have been given.

Evidence that some cultures are more prone to plagiarism and cheating than others is controversial with some studies finding this to be the case [Introna et. al, 03] and others finding no such evidence [Lesko, 96]. My own study conducted as part of my individual project for PGCHE revealed no significant differences between the attitudes of native and non-native English speakers.

While the evidence that non-native English speakers are more prone to cheating for cultural reasons is equivocal a poor grasp of English does clearly exacerbate other problems that research has shown do contribute to cheating. For instance it makes it harder for students to grasp the underlying material and [Chester, 01] highlights this as an important motivation behind plagiarism. Similarly in essay and report writing there is a tendency to quote material because students feel they can not express points better by paraphrasing - this temptation will be even stronger when the writer is not themselves fluent in the language. I have also observed in programming laboratories that where a large group exist who all speak the same language (other than English) they tend to congregate, with the weaker English-speakers relying on the stronger ones for translation, in some cases even delegating people to ask questions for them and interpret the answers. Such close collaboration can not help but increase issues involving collusion and the similarity of answers.

Lastly, it seems to me, that irrespective of the actual interaction between culture and cheating a perception among staff that non-native English speakers are more likely to cheat leads to them being treated more harshly when discovered.

On a personal level these issues are difficult to tackle. I attempt to be aware of comprehension issues when interacting with non-native English speakers on a one-to-one basis but, as stated above, it is not always easy to get an accurate idea of their level of comprehension and, even when you suspect they may not have understood well, it can be difficult to ascertain exactly where the sources of confusion may lie.

References

[Chester, 01] G. Chester, Plagiarism detection and prevention: final report on the JISC electronic plagiarism detection project, 2001

[Introna et. al, 03] L. Introna, N. Hayes, L. Blair and E. Wood, Cultural Attitudes Towards Plagiarism, Technical Report, Lancaster University, 2003, available from JISCPas Reports

[Jenkins, 01] T. Jenkins, Teaching Programming - A Journey from Teacher to Motivator, The 2nd Annual Conference of the LTSN Center for Information and Computer Sciences, University of North London, 2001. http://www.ics.ltsn.ac.uk/pub/conf2001/.

[Lesko, 96] J. P. Lesko, Plagiarism and questionable appropriation of text by non-native speaker students in taught postgraduate course: views and experiences of postgraduate staff, Proceedings of the Edinburgh Linguistics Department Conference, 1996.