How Can the Teacher Get Students to Analyze More Deeply in their Essay Writing?

How Can the Teacher Get Students to Analyze More Deeply in their Essay Writing? http://media.usm.maine.edu/~lenny/sloan3 presentation.ppt Lenny Shedletsky lenny@maine.edu & Alice Goodwin

Report on Writing Test • writing test [national test of writing for grades 8 &12, nearly ¾ fall short, appeared 9-15-12] • “The Education Department judged writing based on organization, level of detail and variety of sentence structure. The students wrote for 30 minutes.”

From the newspaper report on writing [9-15-12] • Nearly three-quarters of the eighth- and 12th-graders failed to achieve proficiency on a national writing test, according to a U.S. government report released Friday. • Most students' writing "falls far short of the well-organized, well-developed prose that connects with those they are trying to reach," Susan Pimentel, a member of the U.S. Education Department board overseeing the test, said in a statement. • The new version of the test, officially called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, offered students the tools of modern writing: a laptop with a word-processing program, including spell-check, cutting and pasting and other editing functions, as well as a thesaurus. • More than 24,000 eighth graders and 28,000 12th graders took the exam. On the writing exam, 24 percent of students were considered proficient in writing and 3 percent ranked as advanced.

SOME BACKGROUND • Alice and I have been working on this research program for a number of years now, adding new empirical studies at the rate of about 1 per year. • In essence, we began by asking what the teacher can do to facilitate critical thinking in discussions.

What We Tried • With regard to discussion, we examined a number of different approaches, including: • Face-to-Face vs. Online discussion; • A variety of instructional practices, e.g., summarizing discussion as individuals or as a group; • Level of analysis required by task, conceptual or surface; • The use of a teaching assistant to facilitate group discussions; • The level of personal relevance of topics; • Rubrics of various kinds; • Grading posts and offering detailed rubrics; • Rubrics and peer rating; • Peer rating plus rubrics plus emailing the rating and rationale for rating to the teacher;

For a Fuller Overview • OUR FIRST 7 STUDIES

TRANSITION TO WRITING • As you might expect, the low level of critical thinking evidenced in discussion is also present in students’ writing (http://wsuctproject.wsu.edu/; Van Gelder, 2005). Arum and Roksa (2011) wrote: “ . . . many students are only minimally improving their skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing during their journeys through higher education” (p. 35). • Here are some slides that explain how we switched into looking at making an argument in writing: • http://media.usm.maine.edu/~lenny/new4_mappers copy.ppt

THE STRUGGLE WITH WRITING • Here is an example of a student paper not elaborating or persisting with a problem to address: Critical Analysis #1 Symbolic Interactionism is a fun way to view this story. For instance, Goffmans theory asserts that we are in “constant negotiation with others” to “define … the nature of the situation” (66). In this case, it seems as though the girl is using Jane’s silence to interpret the uncomfortable feeling of the situation. She is assuming that Jane’s silence is creating an awkward atmosphere; however, we have no idea if Jane feels the same way. She also mentions her unwillingness to discuss “the fact that she was leaving”, but she is still trying to define the situation like the theory says. However, this would be hard to do without the interaction. In another way too, it could be assumed that Jane isn’t fulfilling her friend “role” properly in this girl’s eyes. An example of this would be how their time spent together had felt forced because she mentions “generally we don’t lack for conversation”. So, the lack of a “consistent performance” (66) is causing the tension. This lack of communication is causing lots of confusion.

MAPPING • In an attempt to discover whether or not we can improve the quality of essays in my 100-level Introduction to Communication class, we designed a study to test the effects of mapping on student essays. • Here is a summary of what we asked for and what the students produced: • http://media.usm.maine.edu/~lenny/new4_mappers copy.ppt

TEST OF MAPPING EFFECTS • We compared two sections of the course (Fall, 2010 and Fall, 2011) for mapping’s effects on essay writing. • We looked at 5 dependent measures: • Word count for summarizing the Critical Incident (CI); • Number of concepts used from the course to analyze the CI; • Number of Connections made between concepts and the CI; • Word count for summarizing the essay; • Total number of words in the essay;

SOME OF OUR RESULTS • AS YOU VIEW THE RESULTS KEEP IN MIND: • PRACTICE • MAPPING TO AID COGNITION

COMPARISON OF COURSE INSTRUCTION vs. INDIVIDUAL ACTUALLY MAPPING OR NOT

CONCEPTS Mean number of Concepts used to analyze the CI by paper (p< .05)

CONNECTIONS Mean number of Connections made between Concepts and the CI by Paper (p <.05).

SUMMARY OF THE ESSAY MEAN NUMBER OF WORDS USED TO SUMMARIZE THE ESSAY BY PAPER AND BY WHETHER OR NOT THE INDIVIDUAL MAPPED

TOTAL NUMBER OF WORDS IN THE ESSAY MEAN NUMBER OF WORDS USED TO WRITE THE ESSAYS BY PAPER AND BY INDIVIDUALS WHO MAPPED OR DID NOT MAP

WHAT DOES IT MEAN • Persistence • Writing vs. Critical Thinking • Feeling confident about mapping

How Can the Teacher Get Students to Analyze More Deeply in their Essay Writing?