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Experimental Course Material The Computing Skills and Concepts course has been taught in three universities: Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the University of Western Australia (UWA), and the University of Michigan (UM). The course material for the first two universities is identical. On this page you can find information about the two unique versions of the course including course schedules, teaching scripts, and practice files. Notes for Downloading Files Practice files are provided in WinZip archives. Files for UNIX and Dreamweaver must be placed in subfolders after downloading. For UNIX, the files should be placed in a directory whose name follows the underscore character (e.g. files extracted from "Unix1_example" should go in the "example" folder for the Course 1 practice files). For Dreamweaver, a file named 'readme.txt' is included in each practice file archive to explain the appropriate directory structure. The script files on this page require Adobe Acrobat Reader for viewing.If you plan to modify the course material for use at your own university or company, please visit the Current Course page. Suresh Bhavnani will be happy to discuss any modifications to the course content to fit your needs. Course Content for Experiments at CMU and UWA The experimental group received strategic instruction as provided below. The control group received command instruction based on a list of commands that the control instructors followed (this material is not provided here). Both groups were taught the same commands. See Bhavnani et al., (2001) for a detailed description of the experiment.
Course Content for Experiment at UM (SI-101) The experimental version of SI-101 was restricted to Art & Design and Music students. The UNIX portion of the course offered at CMU was replaced by an introduction to Web design in Macromedia Dreamweaver. The course was divided into two parts: the first part provided the strategic instruction and the second half required students to use the first half skills to build their own Web sites. The first half constituted the experimental conditions described below. The second half was common to all students. In the first part of the course, the experimental group of students received instruction based on strategies that were specific to an application in addition to the general form of those strategies. The Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel scripts were virtually identical to the scripts used in the experiments at CMU and UWA. The control group received instruction only on application-specific strategies. Instructors in both groups received identical practice with the scripts, and all students followed the same semester schedule. The data from this experiment are currently being analyzed. Download semester schedule: The table below provides course material taught in the control (red) and the experimental (green) conditions. Other files were common to both groups.
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