2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Post-secondary computer science students acquire a range of skills and competencies, including professional skills such as technical writing. These professional skills and other program learning outcomes are assessed via students’ course work. As assessment practices continue to evolve, there is an increasing shift towards the use of automated assessment tools (AATs) in post-secondary computer science education. Scholars have studied AATs and their use, but few have considered how substantial use of AATs affects students’ learning of skills that are not assessable by AATs. The shift to heavier use of AATs motivates considering the impact that assessment practices have on the student experience but limited research has examined this topic. This paper begins to fill that research gap by addressing the research question: How do course assessment practices affect students’ perspectives of learning technical writing?

I conducted an interpretive qualitative study, grounded in Lave and Wenger’s Situated Learning Theory and Social Theory of Learning, with 10 third and fourth-year computer science student participants. I used reflective journal writing and beginning-of-term and end-of-term interviews to gather rich data on the student experience. I generated themes from the data corpus via Braun and Clarke’s reflexive thematic analysis and found that students are conflicted in their desire to learn technical writing and that their beliefs are influenced by assessment practices. They believe that technical writing is important for their careers and they want to learn technical writing in computer science courses, however, they perceive that technical writing is not assessed often or deeply enough and shared that course assessment practices affect the learning activities that they prioritize.