Opinion:: Increasing Learning through Writing in Quantitative (and Computer) Courses
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Abdullah Shibli [1]
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[1] Stonehill College
Stonehill College
Town of Easton, Estados Unidos
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- Localización: Innovations in education and teaching international, ISSN 1470-3297, Vol. 30, Nº 1, 1993, págs. 50-56
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
The title of this paper might cause a culture shock among many. It would not be an exaggeration to say that among many of my colleagues in the academic community, the expression ‘writing in quantitative courses’ would be considered a contradiction in terms. Popularly, the goals and methods of composition courses and those of quantitative courses are perceived to be mutually exclusive.** Stereotypes abound regarding the methods of discourse and the practitioners of these two disciplines. Some examples are: ‘Those who write do not like the cold logic of equations and numbers’ and ‘The quantitative types are uncomfortable with the vagueness and wordiness of the literary types.’ Some of these stereotypes are not altogether without justification. The ‘quantitative’ types talk in a language where every third word is in mathematese, replete with terms such as ‘mean’, ‘median’, ‘rank’, ‘correlation’, ‘probability’ or worse! The archetypal quantitative person is the mathematics professor who fills the blackboard with arcane symbols, but is at a loss for words when asked to explain what was written.
One hardly needs to point out that this forced dichotomy between quantitative courses and the humanities ignores the symbiosis that exists between them, especially from the perspective of the former. In this paper, I would like to discuss my experience in increasing student learning through writing in quantitative and programming courses. In the first section, I present the case for writing in statistics courses, and provide some sample writing assignments; in the second section, I take up the matter of writing in computer courses; in the third, I discuss some hurdles that I have faced in implementing writing in quantitative (including computer) courses.
