Posts Tagged ‘improving student writing skills’
January 31 - A Strategy for Grading Student Writing Assignments
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Effective Teaching Strategies
Do you sometimes (maybe regularly) get papers from students filled with spelling, punctuation, proofreading, and other more serious grammatical problems? Yours is not an English class and you have other content to teach, making it difficult to address these writing problems. And yet leaving them unaddressed puts students in jeopardy. They may not believe us, but the fact is we still live in a culture that “sorts out” people based on their use of language and a student who can’t put together an error-free résumé or cover letter isn’t likely to get many interviews or good jobs.
November 28 - The Writing Process: Step-by-Step Approach Curbs Plagiarism, Helps Students Build Confidence in Their Writing Ability
By: Carmen Hamlin in Effective Teaching Strategies
I’ve long been an advocate of student-centered learning and approaching material from a variety of perspectives. We hear so many buzzwords describing the ways we should teach or the ways our students learn, and we deal increasingly with issues of plagiarism and academic dishonesty. In a classroom of adult learners who frequently view themselves as consumers, we balance the need to meet their demands with the need for them to meet ours. Getting back to the basics can intrinsically incorporate kinesthetic, collaborative learning and nearly eliminate plagiarism while promoting critical thinking.
November 22 - Using Peer Review to Improve Student Writing
By: John Orlando, PhD in Teaching with Technology
As teachers we know that our written work is not ready for publication until it has been reviewed by a variety of colleagues for commentary and edits. External review is needed even for good writers because we have a hard time seeing our own writing errors. Plus, we need that extra feedback to sharpen our ideas, discover new directions to take, and generally elevate our work to publication quality.
August 31 - Giving Feedback on Student Writing: An Innovative Approach
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
I ran across an interesting idea in the British journal, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education involving the use of something called interactive cover sheets. First-year students in an outdoor studies degree program took a two-semester, six module course which required preparation of a number of written assignments. After preparing their papers, students attached an interactive cover sheet on which they raised questions about the paper they had just completed, thereby identifying the specific areas for feedback.
June 29 - Alternative Writing Assignments: The Integrated Paper
By: Genevieve Pinto Zipp in Teaching and Learning
As faculty working with students to explore topics of interests we frequently request that they review the literature to gain an understanding of what is known and unknown about a topic and then present their findings in an integrated manner. While many students are familiar with developing papers termed “literature reviews” or “reviews of the literature,” these types of papers frequently do not afford the students the opportunity to integrate what has been found. Thus faculty have begun to require that students present their findings and thoughts via what is known as an “integrated paper format.”
May 13 - How Do I Give Feedback that Improves Student Writing?
By: Mary Bart in 20 Minute Mentor, Teaching & Learning
How Do I Give Feedback that Improves Student Writing? Program includes a CD with the video presentation, plus supplemental materials, PowerPoint slides, and complete transcript • $99 Trying to teach students to improve their writing can be like trying to teach cats to fetch: Demonstrate all you want, encourage all you want, implore all you
March 30 - Time Management Strategies for Student Writers
By: Lauren Shapiro in Teaching and Learning
Is it me or do students often seem surprised by just how long the writing process takes? When I first started teaching, I never thought to address the issue of time management with my students. Over the course of my next several classes, however, I started to notice a pattern in students’ comments, such as: The work in this class is really, really time consuming; I’ve never spent this much time writing before; and I didn’t realize it would take SO much time but I am really happy with the end results.
January 17 - The Lost Art of Note Taking When Writing a Research Paper
By: Matt Birkenhauer in Teaching and Learning
When students write essays requiring research, in the age of Wikipedia and other online resources, I worry a little, not so much about the quality of the sources themselves (that has always varied, even in the day of hardcopy sources), but about the quality or outright dearth of note taking that often accompanies the writing of research papers.
November 4 - Feedback Techniques that Improve Student Writing
By: Brian E. Harper, PhD and William Beasley, EdD in Teaching and Learning
Yvonne is frustrated. She wants to do well in her language arts class, but each essay she completes fails to earn her the grade she believes she deserves. Although her teacher thoughtfully writes out corrective comments on her essays, to Yvonne these seem to run together, forming a nonsensical sea of red ink. With each assignment, she feels less capable and grows more resentful of her instructor.
September 21 - Writing Comments That Lead to Learning
By: Susan M. Taylor in Effective Teaching Strategies
Instructors who require papers spend a good deal of time emphasizing the importance of audience and purpose in writing. Writers who remember their readers and their writing objectives are much more likely to use good judgment about the decisions that go into creating an effective piece of writing. This is equally true of the comments instructors write on students’ papers. I’d like to share some suggestions, some of which I learned the hard way.
