From a Life Science perspective, not only do I agree with this, but
specifically recommend the use of a more "casual" style, where (e.g.)
abbreviations are used to provide a more "conversational" perception. If
a lesson reads like a professional manual, participants will be focused
on (or distracted by) the subtleties of the language because
word-smithing is an essential part of professional writing where gobs of
meaning are jammed into the shortest sentence possible.
Professional jargon in particular is bad. If a term needs to be learned,
then define it, otherwise avoid it.
But, I've also seen times when jargon can be introduced in engaging ways
("A drunk Foo enters a Bar and sed...")
pete
On 12/05/2017 11:19 AM, Greg Wilson wrote:
A result that may be of use in designing Carpentry lessons (from
https://doi.org/10.1145/3141880.3141898):
Intuition suggests that problems from a familiar context should be
easier to solve than the same problems described using an unfamiliar
domain. However, prior work on contextualized programming problems
has found little evidence to support this hypothesis. In this paper,
we extend this work by exploring the use of a particular familiar
context: problem domains used earlier in an introductory programming
course. We conduct a crossover design study in a large introductory
programming course to compare problems with and without context
related to previous coursework. Our results suggest that any
advantage conveyed by a familiar context is dominated by other
factors, such as the complexity of terminology used in the
description, the length of the problem description, and the
availability of examples. This suggests that educators should focus
on simplicity of language and the development of examples, rather
than seeking contexts that may aid in understanding problems.
Cheers,
Greg
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