Characterize the Difficulties that International Computer Science Students Face

• Main Author: Alharbi, Eman
• Language: EN
• Published: University of Colorado at Colorado Springs 2016
• Subjects: Education|Computer science
• Online Access: http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10102300

<p> International Computer Science students, who form the majority of students in Engineering colleges in the U.S (Anderson, 2013), face a lot of difficulties and barriers that are unknown and unexpressed. Hiding these struggles may affect the quality of their education, and will repeat the struggles over and over with the coming students. We conducted a qualitative study to discover the barriers that international Computer Science students have and their special needs. The data was collected by interviewing international Computer Science students and some of their instructors in the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (UCCS). The study found that international Computer Science students have English barriers evaluated on the following dimensions: listening and understanding lectures, participating and expressing ideas, presenting, writing, and reading. Moreover, students have identified another set of difficulties, which is technical barriers based on educational background and the ability to deal with advanced software tools.</p>