Jashandeep Singh

3/11/2019

Intro to Engineering

Instructor Hill

Analysis of “Cowboy” and “Cowgirl” Programming and Success in College Computer Science”

This lab report examines how pre-college experience with computers and coding affects student grades and overall success in introductory computer science classes. The lab report finds out that students who have had previous experience with coding on their own, on average, tend to score higher and graduate at higher percentages than students who did not code on their own or had not known how to code before college. Additionally, the lab report contains all eight sections that a lab report should. All in all, this lab report is very effective in explaining why students with prior coding experience scored better than those without.

The title of this lab report is effective however, it is not explained in the abstract and can be hard to understand by just reading it. Though it is explained later on it would have been more effective to include a brief explanation of the title in the abstract. On the other hand, the abstract is very effective on explaining the major aspects of the lab report, which are that prior experience with coding increases student grades and graduation rates compared to students without prior experience, as stated before.

The introduction is effective because it gives necessary background information on why it is important for students to score well on the introductory computer science classes. Additionally, it explains what can be done to ensure students score well in their introductory classes and further computer science education. The lab report explains that students that do not score well in their introductory classes are more likely to change their major than students who score well. This is a problem because as the lab report explains, “The current American-trained future workforce in the computer science and IT fields is too small to maintain the nation’s status as a leader in this area.” The lab report explains that giving students computer science in grades K-12 will significantly increase their chances in scoring well in introductory classes.

The methods section of the lab report were also effective because it takes the reader step by step through the process the scientists took to find out how pre-college experience in computers and coding affected students grades. This section shows how the researchers sent out surveys to thousands of students in over a hundred colleges, both 2 and 4 year colleges. The researchers examined many varieties of students educational experiences, family background and demographic characteristics and even got final grades from their professors. The section goes in depth about every step taken to do the research and makes it easy for other scientists to recreate the experiment.

The results section is effective because it shows that students with previous experience in fact do score higher than those without. However, the results also find out that if students do programming on their own besides from class their scores tend to not differ significantly. Additionally, the results section explains all the results in depth, provides multiple graphs demonstrating their finding and even simplify their findings towards the end of the section.

The discussion and conclusion section was also very effective. The discussion and conclusion explained their results in great detail. The researchers explained that their hypotheses about students with prior experience was indeed correct, and that students with prior experience outperformed all other groups. The section goes into more detail by explaining that though prior experience students outperformed other groups of students, students with class and outside experience, the average of the two groups were very significant, only differing by a few points. The section also explains that since college is more based on an independent learning style, students who went out on their own to learn programming might be more suited for college than students who did not.

The reference section was effective because it listed all the references that are used many a times throughout the entire lab report.

Over all, the lab report was very effective in persuading the reader that prior experience with coding and computers in general help students in computer science achieve higher grades, graduate at higher rates, and be more successful in their field.