Posts Tagged ‘improving student writing skills’
March 11 - Better Research Basics, One Sentence at a Time
By: Barbara Barney Nelson, PhD and Scarlet Clouse in Effective Teaching Strategies
Breathes there a professor of any subject with soul so dead who never to himself hath said, “Today’s undergraduates are hopeless at research!” (apologies to Sir Walter Scott). It is easy to blame high schools or freshman English classes, but that doesn’t fix our problem. As a frustrated educator of future teachers (Clouse) and a 20-year veteran of teaching college writing and research (Nelson), we obviously sympathize and often feel blamed. We have found that a better approach is an interdisciplinary effort that gives students ample opportunities to practice and develop their writing and research skills. The cumulative effect of this approach not only benefits faculty, but our students seem to appreciate and feel less intimidated working within this method as well.
March 6 - What Types of Writing Assignments Are in Your Syllabus?
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
Thanks to the Writing-Across-the-Curriculum movement we are having our students write more and we’re using a wider range of writing assignments. Right?
If that’s what you’re doing, it’s consistent with the actions of faculty teaching undergraduate sociology courses; as documented by an analysis of 405 different syllabi. Almost 95% of those syllabi described some type of writing assignment and most of them required more than one.
November 26 - Get Visual: A Technique for Improving Student Writing
By: Deborah Miller Fox in Effective Teaching Strategies
One of the ongoing challenges for my composition students is the task of narrowing a broad, generalized topic into a more particular, focused topic for a short research essay. To help them develop this skill, I now prescribe a broad topic for everyone to use in the first research essay. Over several class sessions, we work collaboratively to explore the general topic, identify more particular subtopics, and develop research strategies to investigate these subtopics as possible subject matter.
November 6 - Informal Writing Assignments: Promoting Learning Through Writing
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Effective Teaching Strategies
The Writing Across the Curriculum movement has successfully introduced faculty across disciplines to a variety of writing, including very informal writing that faculty do not necessarily read or grade. The advocacy for this kind of informal writing rests on the old premise that practice makes perfect—that as long as students are writing something, their writing will likely improve.
October 17 - Turnitin Study Reveals Types and Frequency of Comments Left by Instructors on Student Papers
By: Press Release in EdTech News and Trends
Turnitin, the leader in originality checking and online grading, announced the results of a new study analyzing instructor feedback on 2,093,396 student papers submitted through GradeMark, the Turnitin online grading tool. The study found that while instructors have accepted online grading as mainstream, they are finding the same types of grammatical and compositional errors across secondary and postsecondary grade levels.
September 18 - Teaching Research and Writing Skills: Not Just for Introductory Courses
By: Kevin Brown, PhD in Teaching and Learning
Most professors want students to know how to research and write in their fields. In fact, many degree programs now have introductory courses for majors with content that addresses these research and writing basics. However, the assumption that students learn everything they need in one course is a faulty one. All of us who teach courses for majors need to regularly revisit this content if students are to develop these research and writing abilities. Let me be specific and suggest six things professors can do that help students improve in both areas.
September 10 - Working Toward a Fair Assessment of Students’ Reflective Writing
By: Karen Hughes Miller, PhD, V. Faye Jones, MD, PhD, Pradip Patel MD, and Michael Rowland, PhD in Educational Assessment
There is little argument that reflective writing is a good way to foster critical thinking, encourage self expression, and give students a sense of ownership of their work (Chretien et al. 2012, Kennison and Misselwitz, 2002). This generation of college students has been doing reflective writing since elementary school so they are familiar with the process, even if not all enjoy it. Almost every academic discipline includes content on which learner reflection is appropriate; so the problem, typically, is not in creating the assignment but rather in assessing the work. How do we place a fair and equitable grade on an assignment that has so many variables? What are we looking for in our students’ work that we can reward and encourage with a good grade?
August 1 - How Can I Use Informal Writing as Part of a Low-Stakes Grading Strategy?
By: Mary Bart in 20 Minute Mentor, Assessment & Learning Goals
Learn how informal writing assignments can create a dialogue between the students and instructor, boost student confidence, and increase student motivation.
June 19 - Helping Students Write Better Lab Reports
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Instructional Design
One of the messages of the Writing Across the Curriculum movement is that writing skills can be developed in any course and that often the best place to start is with current assignments that involve writing. That’s where chemists Gragson and Hagen started. They were disappointed in the quality of student writing in their “journal-style” lab reports. Despite giving students a sample lab, a writing manual, and lots of good feedback, the quality of the lab reports was low and did not improve across the 10 to 15 lab reports students prepared.
April 5 - The Eyes of a Writer: A Strategy to Improve Student Writing
By: Kristin M. Gehsmann, EdD in Teaching and Learning
How many times have you provided feedback in the margins of students’ papers, only to find that you’re providing the very same feedback on the next set of papers? As a new faculty member, I was left dumbfounded by this experience. I couldn’t understand why my students continuously made the same errors and why my feedback did not improve their papers. I was also surprised by the number of students who requested meetings to discuss why they felt their papers warranted a higher grade. My colleagues assured me that I wasn’t alone in these experiences, but I knew there had to be alternatives to this unproductive cycle.
