A computer literacy project for first-year college students

Abstract

As we enter the decade of the 1990s, no university can ignore addressing a very real need of our incoming students--the need to understand and make use of computers. General knowledge and familiarity with computer operations and basic typing skills, plus knowing how to use databases, spreadsheets and word processors, are needed by any college student who intends to work in almost any field. As pressing as this need is, however, this aspect of liberacy has not been addressed thoroughly enough in the college preparation provided by most high schools. Skills Poor The students who attend the McKeesport Campus of Penn State represent a cross section of American college students--racially mixed, rich and poor, adult and traditional college age. Most of our students are not academically superior, but exemplify the mainstay of high school graduates who wish to attend college. Many of our incoming freshman arrive with limited reading and writing skills. So a great deal of time and effort is devoted to working at a basic skills level with these first-semester students. Some of their timidity at the keyboard can be attributed to their general fear of having to communicate, especially in writing. Often students have had little experience in high school with typing. For example, we've noticed many freshmen do not use capital letters when they type because they are unfamiliar with the shift key. Non-alphanumeric characters are also foreign to them. Many students are not used to the mechanics of preparing a manuscript: the use of parentheses, brackets, apostrophes, quotation marks and quotes inside quotes. Other associated skills such as setting margins, tabs and page length; preparing outlines, footnotes or bibliographies; or using quotations and paraphrasing are also not well learned. Perhaps because they feel ill-prepared, many students arrive for instruction at the computer center displaying negative attitudes. They are less than enthusiastic, sometimes even resentful, and do not feel the necessity to regard their computer training with the same degree ofs eriousness as they do their regular classes. As a result, often students don't initially strive for excellence in their computer work. Yet it seems apparent that unless freshman students are given some knowledge of computer literacy and word processing at the beginning of their college careers, many, especially those in non-scientific or non-technical fields, may be unable to compete successfully with others during their college education. A Plan to Provide the Basics The goal of McKeesport Campus' Computer Literacy Project is to provide a significant first step in general computer familarity for all college students. Its purpose is limited and specific: to ensure that students, at the start of their college careers, become familiar with the use of a personal computer, the campus' network and the rudiments of word processing. Long-term, the goal is that with practical, hands-on training, students will utilize the computer as a necessary and productive tool that they can rely on throughout their college careers. In the short-term, the objective is for freshman students to be able to write their first-year composition papers with a word processor. All students enrolled in Freshman English must attend two training sessions held in the computer center in partial fulfillment of the course's requirements. Upon completion, the composition instructors are notified, and students are then required to produce one or more papers. Instructors specifically encourage their students to work on all phases of their papers at the computer--prewriting, composing and revising--and to not use the computer only as a typewriter to produce a final copy. At the beginning of the fall 1991 semester, students were notified in their English classes of the dates for the computer training sessions, which were held over several weeks. …