Computer Science Students and Searching the Internet
+ How Computer Science Students Learn
Searching the internet for reliable sources of information is difficult for Computer Science students (Ben-David Kolikant & ma’ayan, 2018, p. 213). The sheer quantity of documentation created by countless authors makes it hard to filter out irrelevant information even for experiences programmers.
@ben-davidkolikant2018 interviewed twelve undergraduate Computer Science students to find out how the students felt about performing searches while programming. The objectives were to identify common areas of difficulty when searching and also to identify the cognitive processes involved when using the internet to solve programming bugs. Of the twelve students, six were from Britain and six from Israel. Each group of six contained half male and half female students. Since the discipline is heavily male-dominated, it is good that they considered this disparity in their research.
What @ben-davidkolikant2018 [p. 215] found was that first-year students did not use relevant words about their current problem when phrasing their queries. The first-year students tended to take whatever the first search engine result was and copy-paste it in their code without knowing what it actually did. None of the interviewees stated that they had any formal training in how to use search engines effectively. Knowing the right questions to ask is a byproduct of increased experience (Ben-David Kolikant & ma’ayan, 2018, p. 220). The authors concluded by asking if teachers can aid students about how to search effectively. They mentioned that further research into this topic is required.