| Mission: | To promote research, support innovative practice, and thus advance excellence in teaching, learning and leadership. |
WRITING TO LEARN
A Short Course Given in Spring, 2004
By Barbara Bretcko
Professor of English
CAITL Fellow
PART 1: Low Stakes Writing to Produce Better Performance on Tests
Each of the questions below is linked to its response.
1. What are the differences between High Stakes and Low Stakes writing?
2. Why spend class time having your students write?
3. How should you respond to Low Stakes writing?
4. What kinds of Low Stakes writing improve student performance on tests?
5. Why do students write poorly on tests?
6. What are some signs that students are writing poorly because of a failure to grasp the material?
7. Where can you read more about using Low Stakes writing in class?
8. Where can your students—and you—get online help with writing?
PART 2: Low Stakes Writing to Produce Better Research Papers
1. WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HIGH AND LOW STAKES WRITING?
High Stakes Writing is Writing to Demonstrate Learning: This is the kind of writing most of us think of as “college writing.”
• Its object is to allow the student to show you what she knows.
• It is expected to follow the conventions of formal academic prose and may be expected to follow additional conventions that are specific to your discipline.
• It can be written in or out of class.
• It is expected to be error free when written outside of class.
• It consists of essay tests, out of class essays, research papers and projects, book reports, lab reports, analyses of case studies etc.
• It is graded.
Low Stakes Writing is Writing to Learn: This is the kind of writing I’m arguing for.
• Its object is to simulate thought, generate ideas and connections, keep students engaged and thinking during class, and/or give us information about our students.
• It is usually short and informal.
• It can be written in or out of class.
• It can consist of myriad tasks from one-word responses to short essays.
• Although it is messy, it is never corrected.
• Although you may give credit for it, it is never graded.
2. WHY SPEND TIME IN CLASS HAVING YOUR STUDENTS WRITE?
• Low stakes writing improves high stakes writing. That is, writing in class—to learn—produces better writing on papers and essay exams and can even produce better scores on objective tests.
• It improves the climate in the classroom by making students active participants in the class.
• Low stakes writing improves discussion by making it likely that everyone has something to say—because they will have something written down.
• It can ease student anxiety about writing in general and about writing for you specifically.
• Low stakes writing lets you spot misunderstandings that are epidemic in a class; it also lets you identify specific students who are having trouble. You can spot these problems before—not after—the first exam or paper.
• Low stakes writing is excellent practice for taking essay tests. It can address the gap between material a student thinks he knows and the ability to communicate it to someone else. (This gap is usually the product of the study technique students refer to as “going over” the material without any attempt to engage with it.)
• It is a way for your students to practice a specific skill or kind of thinking important in your discipline.
• Low stakes writing gives you practical information about what your students know and don’t know. You can use short, painless low stakes tasks to demonstrate that they did the reading, that they understood the reading, that they understand what you’ve been talking about for the last 15 minutes, that they are having difficulty understanding an idea, term, principle, etc.
• Low stakes writing is a way to encourage and give credit for reading before class and taking notes during class. This is a way to give shy students a chance for credit for reading and thinking about the material. It can also be used to encourage taking notes in class and while they read by allowing the use of those notes on in-class writing such as quizzes.
• It gives students a risk-free environment in which to try out new ideas, take creative risks, or ask questions they are too shy to ask out loud.
• Finally, low stakes writing can give you a chance to get to know your students better. You can design tasks that encourage students to share past experiences with classes like this one or that allow them to express their anxiety over—or pleasure at doing—this kind of work.
3. HOW SHOULD YOU RESPOND TO LOW STAKES WRITING?
“Students learn more from writing than from our responses to their writing.”
--Peter Elbow
I’m addressing responding to the writing before I address the writing itself because, having given writing workshops for years, I know that this is the number one issue.
Rule #1: In Low Stakes writing, correctness is never an issue. Read for the thoughts expressed, not for correctness. Don’t correct spelling, grammar, punctuation, or even your pet grammar peeve. As students have more thoughts, they will get better at expressing them.
Rule #1A: Don’t assume that poor writing means poor writing skills. Writing that does not communicate should be seen first as reflecting the student’s problem with understanding the material or understanding your directions. Even excellent writers will write poorly when they don’t really know what they’re talking about.
Rule #2: There are levels of response to Low Stakes writing. Not every piece of writing should be handled the same way. You should never assume that all writing has to be corrected, evaluated or even responded to. You can respond in many ways:
• Response A: No Response Students can produce private writing for your course. This can be done as a journal or in class. Give credit for everyone in class that day or simply count the pages filled in a journal.
Advantages of allowing some writing to remain private
-- It gives students a safe place to learn fluency (i.e. the ability to write enough)
-- It gives practice at putting words on paper in a manner that can become as natural as speaking.
-- It gives students practice in carrying on a dialogue with themselves, at asking and answering their own questions.
-- It leads students to take more risks and thus to discover new lines of thought.
-- Adolescents, older returning students, and students from other than the dominant culture find it good to have a space where they can express themselves without thinking about what is acceptable or obsessing about correctness.
• Response B: Peer Feedback Put students in pairs or in groups of three or four. They can read each other’s work and respond verbally in class, read and respond at home, or read and respond online.
Students need a little guidance with this. Move slowly. Start with no feedback, with one student reading aloud to the other without comment. Move to “tell back,” where one student reads aloud and the other retells what he or she heard. Then go to positive feedback, where the listener responds with one or two things that were good. Finally, mix positive and constructive feedback. Ask students to “suggest one way to improve the essay” rather than “find a mistake.” And instruct students to always balance one constructive point with one positive point.
• Response C: Teacher comments This is what most of us think of when we think of responding to student writing. It’s this response that leads us to Rule #3.
Rule #3: Keep your response to low stakes writing simple and similar. After you experiment with different kinds of responses, be as consistent as possible in your feedback mode.
Some ways to respond:
• Give check marks: √, √+ and √-
• Create an “up or down” response: Acceptable/Unacceptable, Pass/Fail, Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory, Enough information/Insufficient information
• Give points. Some assignments get points just for getting done. (You can even give points without reading what they wrote.)
• Create a simple rubric:
S U
Content _____ _____
Clarity _____ _____
• Underline only, using a straight line for a sentence (or part thereof) that is clear and a squiggly line for one that is unclear. (This is Peter Elbow’s suggestion.)
• Ask a single question that will guide their next writing. (“Which point is most important?” “How does this fit with yesterday’s discussion?”)
• Write a single sentence. (“I can see your point.” “I disagree, but your argument is good.”)
• Respond with “Thanks.”
• Before you read their responses, have students exchange writings and respond to each other verbally or in writing, in pairs or in groups of three or four. Then add a single sentence of teacher response. (“I agree with Tom.” “I like it when you guys disagree because it shows you’re thinking.” “You got some good advice.”)
4. WHAT KINDS OF LOW STAKES WRITING TASKS IMPROVE STUDENT PERFORMANCE ON TESTS?
A Good Word For Objective Test Items: If you struggle with determining whether a student’s poor essay is a result of inadequate writing skills or inadequate knowledge, try having some objective questions on the test, too. A student who is a whiz at the objective questions but does poorly on the writing may, indeed, need help with writing. But if students do poorly on both, you have more evidence that they just didn’t know the material.
Low Stakes Writing To Improve Performance on Objective Tests:
• Give them a single multiple choice question and ask them to write 1 or 2 sentences about why each response (a-d) is either correct or incorrect. This works best if you allow a few minutes for students to talk with each other about their responses.
• Do the same with a true/false item, asking for a brief explanation.
• Ask them to define a term using complete sentences and giving an example that demonstrates their understanding.
• Use test items from old exams to give students a preview of your testing style.
Low Stakes Writing to Improve Performance on Essay Tests: Although you can have students read each other’s responses to this kind of writing, it is more helpful if you give the student some idea of how their response would have done on an actual test.
• Give students a real essay question from an old exam and 3 or 4 answers to it. (You can collect these or write them yourself.) Ask them to rank the responses from best to worst, explaining the ranking in a few sentences. Give them time in class to talk with each other about their responses. Explain how you would rank them and why. This can be done as a group exercise in class, an individual exercise at home, or posted on your web page for the course.
• Give them a test question and about the same amount of time to write an answer as they would have on a test. (Or give them a shortened question and shortened length of time.)
• Ask them to write a full sentence definition of a term, then use it in a meaningful sentence or two that establishes an appropriate context. For example:
Definition: Manifestation means demonstration. (Sounds good. The student seems to know the word.)
Sentence: The angry voters held a manifestation on the mall in Washington. (Uh-oh.)
Sentence: The picket line was a manifestation. (This sentence still doesn’t prove that the student knows the word’s meaning and use.)
Sentence: The picket line was a manifestation of the workers’ frustration.
• Use a short in-class writing to teach them how to do comparison and contrast. They frequently produce an explanation of A followed by an explanation of B without articulating how they are alike or different. Teach them to specify how A is like B, how A is unlike B, and that they have to do both steps to get full credit on your test.
• If they will have to explain steps in a process, ask them to explain a simple process, related or unrelated to the class. Sometimes trying to explain how to brush your teeth can point out the kind of clarity a process explanation has to have.
• Divide the class into as many groups as there are steps in the process, and assign the explanation of one step to each group.
• Provide the answer and ask them to write the question.
• Ask them to write test questions. This works best in pairs or small groups. If you use one of their questions on the exam, you both validate the exercise and teach them to do this for themselves when they study.
• Use post-test writing to help them reflect on their performance and to give you feedback about how they prepared. The aim is to make them aware of their own study habits and change them if they are unproductive. This kind of writing can be largely objective and anonymous. (Give 5 or 10 points to everyone in class that day.)
Possible questions for a post-test survey:
How much of the reading did you do?
How much time did you spend studying?
Do you take notes in class?
Do you take notes while you read?
Do you mark your book when you read?
Do you mark passages in your book that the teacher refers to in class?
Please write a paragraph explaining how you studied.
What grade did you receive?
What grade did you expect?
5. WHY DO STUDENTS WRITE POORLY ON TESTS?
When students do poorly on an objective test, we assume that they didn’t know the material very well. But when they do poorly on a written exam or a paper, we question whether the real problem was with their writing ability rather than their facility with the material. This is often a red herring.
Some of the most common reasons students don’t do well on an exam:
• They didn’t study the material enough or in the right way. Some students simply don’t spend enough time studying. But some students who do poorly have spent hours and hours preparing for your test. However, if you ask them how they prepared, you’re most likely to hear “I went over my notes.” In other words, they did a passive reading (scanning?) of notes that may be of poor quality to begin with. This leaves them recognizing terms but unable to define them and remembering examples without remembering what they exemplify. These students frequently write in sentence fragments, not because they don’t know how to write in whole sentences, but because they don’t have whole thoughts to express.
• Even if they studied well, they didn’t try to put what they know into their own words before they sat down to take the test. Thus, they’ve fooled themselves into thinking they know more than they do. Manipulating class and reading notes (making lists, isolating vocabulary words, rewording steps in a process) is a study technique common to high performers and foreign to poor ones.
• They don’t know how to structure an essay response. They don’t really understand what it means to “compare and contrast,” “categorize,” or “define.” These are issues ideal for addressing with in-class, low-stakes writing. Give them 10 minutes in class to write a shortened version of one of these kinds of questions. Respond to them in terms of how they dealt with the organizational pattern, not the correctness of the information. (Or respond to the organization in a separate category from accuracy.) Even if you don’t have your students do low stakes writing before high stakes writing is required, explain what you mean when you instruct them to “compare and contrast” or “define.” Tell them how to structure a response to that prompt. It is especially helpful if you can show them examples.
• They don’t know how much to write. Most of us write the test questions on a single sheet of paper and hand out blue books. To help students solve the knotty puzzle of how much to write, give them a test that they write on. Provide more or less enough space for each question and the reassurance that it’s okay if they write on the back so that those with big handwriting have enough room. If you find this too much trouble for every test, just do it for the first one so that they understand what you mean by “short answer” as opposed to “essay.”
• They manage their time poorly. Students will spend two thirds of the time on the first question and not have enough time for the second. Reminding them of the time during the test an be helpful. If you expect them to answer three questions, tell them when a third of the time has passed and when a third remains. Sometimes students will spend way too much effort answering 5-point identifications and get jammed on the 50-point essay. I found that putting the mega-question first on the test helped some students manage their time better.
• They “narrate” instead of analyzing or explaining. They tell what happened without explaining how or why it happened. Ask them to explain why Lady Macbeth killed herself and they will relate the entire plot of the play. You can forestall this in several ways. First, be specific in your instructions: “Explain the 2 main reasons that Lady Macbeth committed suicide.” Second, ask for specific support for each point: “For each reason, supply a minimum of 3 points of support.” You may only have to be this specific on the first test or two, just until they get to know how much support you like to see.
• They perform an information dump instead of responding to your specific question. In-class writing can show them how to focus and give them some sense of how much is enough, as can essay tests that provide space for answers. But the information dump is usually an indication that the student knows some of the material but didn’t spend enough time studying how the parts relate to each other.
• They misread your instructions or your questions. Remind them to reread the question after they’ve written or, even better, at mid-point in their writing.
• They experience test anxiety. Sometimes you can spot this if you spend a few minutes looking around the room while your students are taking the test. Sometimes students will self-report this problem. There are a few things you can do for the anxious student. You can refer them to counseling, where there are test anxiety workshops every semester. You can also allow the student to take the test in the Testing Center. Sometimes just getting out of the classroom eases their anxiety. A third option has to do with the purpose of your test.
If the only reason that the test is timed has to do with the length of the class period, arrange to allow students who need more time to finish their work in your office or the Testing Center. (If you will be using the Center, be sure to let them know.) Most teachers have the experience that simply allowing more time eases the pressure to the extent that not many students actually need the extra time.
Finally, if the purpose of your test isn’t to have students demonstrate that they have memorized a set of facts, consider allowing students to bring a page of notes to the test. This is a much better alternative than the open book test. It encourages students to choose what they think is important and organize it so that the material is retrievable. This is an excellent study technique. If they can only have a page, they won’t waste time thumbing through masses of material.
• They have learning disabilities. A college student doesn’t have to report a documented learning disability. Those who do self-report trigger a correspondence from counseling indicating the accommodations that are required. If you get this sort of notice, it’s worth your while to talk with the student. Sometimes students know exactly what they need. For example, the accommodation “extra time on tests” may not be as helpful as allowing the student to take the test in the quiet of the Testing Center.
6. WHAT ARE SOME SIGNS THAT STUDENTS ARE WRITING POORLY BECAUSE OF A FAILURE TO GRASP THE MATERIAL?
• They write in a lot of fragments, especially those that begin with “how” and “when.” Sometimes if you have a conference with a student about the test and ask him or her to answer the question orally, they will sometimes speak in fragments, too.
• There is a confusion of information. They use terms you’ve studied, but not in the right context. They feed back examples you gave in class but don’t connect them to material that is relevant to your test question.
• Sometimes the writing sounds like the writer’s first language is not English. If writing in an out-of-class assignment tends to sound this way, the student may have a learning disability. The student may also be trying to “sound intelligent” and as a result uses words that sound good to the student but aren’t used correctly. If you suspect that the latter is the case, talk to the student and assure him that it’s fine to write in his own voice. Believe it or not, that nearly always clears up this problem. If it doesn’t work, send the student to the Writing Center.
• Their essays have a stream-of-consciousness quality, meandering from point to point because they are writing down bits of information as they come to mind.
Note that as students get more practice at writing—high and low stakes—their thinking clears up and so does their writing. Practice may not make for perfection, but it can result in readable prose.
7. WHERE CAN YOU READ MORE ABOUT USING LOW STAKES WRITING IN CLASS?
Bibliography
Bean, J.C., Drenk, D. and Lee, F.D. “Microtheme Strategies for Developing Cognitive Skills.” Teaching Writing in All Disciplines, New Directions for Teaching and Learning. No. 12, (December, 1982).
Beyer, B. “Using Writing to Learn in History.” The History Teacher. 23 (February, 1980): 167-179.
Elbow, Peter. “High Stakes and Low Stakes in Assigning and Responding to Writing.” New Directions for Teaching & Learning. 69 (Spring97): 5.
Elbow, Peter. “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment.” College English. 55. 2 (Feb1993): 187.
Fishman, Stephen M. “Student Writing in Philosophy: A Sketch of Five Techniques.” In Writing to Learn: Strategies for Assigning and Responding to Writing Across the Disciplines, 53-66.
Fulwiler, Toby. “Writing Back and Forth: Class Letters.” In Writing to Learn: Strategies for Assigning and Responding to Writing Across the Disciplines, 15-26.
Garner, R. Michael. “An Efficient Approach to Writing Across the Curriculum: Microthemes in Accounting Classes.” Journal of Education for Business. (March 1994) 69,4. 211.
Kneeshaw, Stephen. “KISSing in the History Classroom: Simple Writing Activities That Work.” Social Studies. Jul 1992; 83,4. 176.
Moore, Randy. “Writing to Learn Biology.” Journal of College Science Teaching. 23. 5. (Mar/Apr94): 289.
Sorcinelli, Mary Deane and Peter Elbow, eds. “Writing to Learn: Strategies for Assigning and Responding to Writing Across the Disciplines.” New Directions in Teaching and Learning, No. 69. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Spring 1997.
Stanley, Linda. “Writing-to-Learn Assignments: The Journal and the Microtheme.” New Directions for Community Colleges.” 19. (March 1991): 1-45.
Steffens, H. “Using Informal Writing in Large History Classes: Helping Students to find Interest and Meaning in History.” Social Studies. 82: 107-09.
Willingham, D. “Effective Feedback on Written Assignments.” Teaching of Psychology. 17. 1: 10-13. ERIC EJ409479.
8. WHERE CAN YOUR STUDENTS—AND YOU—GET ONLINE HELP WITH WRITING?
The web is flooded with information about writing for both faculty and students. You will literally find web sites about web sites and bibliographies of bibliographies. The modest list below is both sufficient for those who want to get their feet wet and a starting point for those who want to swim the channel.
Purdue University’s OWL
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/internet/owls/writing-labs.html
This award-winning web site is the agreed-upon gold standard in online writing labs (OWL). While its design is user-friendly, its coverage of writing issues is both deep and wide. In the section titled “Handouts and Materials for Students and Teachers” you and your students can search for material by category: General Writing Concerns; Grammar, Punctuation, and Spelling; Professional Writing; English as a Second Language; Research and Documenting Sources; Writing Across the Curriculum; and Practice Exercises. The site can also be searched for specific handouts—and the list of topics is nine pages long. The inclusion of practice exercises makes this site truly useful to the student who is a self-motivated learner. But it is also a tool you can use in any of the wired classrooms on RVCC’s campus. (Any of the sites below can be used in a wired class.) You can guide your students to a specific place on the site that you want them to explore at home, or you can take the entire class there as part of a classroom activity on anything from “Using Commas” to “Conducting a Productive Websearch.” Finally, Purdue’s comprehensive site also provides links to more than 90 other OWL’s.
The Harvard University Writing Center http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~wricntr/html/tools.htm
It’s not exactly shocking to find that Harvard has a good online writing lab. It is especially useful for more advanced writers and/or students in honors courses concerned with polishing their technique. Their list of handouts (below) includes sophisticated topics such as “How to Do a Close Reading” as well as information on introductions, conclusions and argumentation skills.
Titles of handouts:
How to Read an Assignment
Moving from Assignment to Topic
How to Do a Close Reading
Overview of the Academic Essay: Thesis, Argument and Counterargument
Essay Structure
Developing a Thesis
Beginning the Academic Essay
Outlining
Counter-Argument
Summary
Topic Sentences and Signposting
Transitioning: Beware of Velcro
How to Write a Comparative Analysis
Ending the Essay: Conclusions
Revising the Draft
Editing the Essay, Part One
Editing the Essay, Part Two
Tips on Grammar, Punctuation, and Style
Rutgers University
Jack Lynch’s “Guide to Grammar and Style”
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/
Jack Lynch’s “Guide to Grammar and Style” provides something other sites overlook: humor. His succinct, idiosyncratic and thoroughly enjoyable guide is ordered alphabetically from “A, An” through use of “-wise” as a suffix. The tone of this site is best displayed in his entry under “Rules”: “There ain't a rule in the language what can't be broke. . . .” His argument for following them is practical: If you break rules “without a good reason — by which I mean a reason evident to your audience — you lose your audience. It's that simple.” Lynch is a diverting place to travel for a quick look-up or an interesting browse.
The University of Central Florida’s University Writing Center
The University Writing Center at the University of Central Florida has lots of handouts. The section called Writing Resources has guidance for different kinds of academic writing, including writing a lab report. The Faculty Resources link contains good advice on constructing and responding to writing assignments.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Writing Center
http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/index.html
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Writing Center is another good center for handouts on everything from reading assignments to proofing a final draft. It has solid, discipline-specific advice on writing and provides extensive links to other Online Writing Centers, organized by topic. A good place to look for a number of handouts on a specific topic.
Free Downloads from Mantex
When you arrive at the Mantex site, click on Free Downloads and then play. They have good information on Study Skills and an excellent bibliography on Writing Skills. Some of the stuff is playful, such as the “26 Golden Rules for Writing Well,” which begins with “Don’t abbrev.” This site’s explanation of plagiarism is excellent. The student is addressed sympathetically and the finer points of academic conventions about citation are clearly explained.
For Faculty
rubistar.com
This site allows you to construct your own rubric or download one from their collection.
The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
http://www.uwm.edu/letsci/edison/wn.html
UWM provides an annotated bibliography of writing across the disciplines articles by discipline: Africology, anthropology, art history, biological sciences, chemistry, communications, economics, foreign languages, general science, geosciences, history, mass communications, mathematical sciences, philosophy, physics, psychology and sociology.
For the RVCC faculty member who is also a graduate student:
The Claremont Graduate University’s Writing Center
http://www.cgu.edu/pages/726.asp
Claremont Graduate University’s Writing Center focuses specifically on graduate student writers and is a good site for those faculty doing writing for their grad courses. It offers handouts on topics such as writing and presenting conference papers; taking summary notes; writing literature reviews, grant proposals, and dissertations. This site also includes an annotated list of web sites for graduate-level writers, organized by subject.
Back to CAITL Home Page
http://www.raritanval.edu/innovative/caitl/prof_development/2003-2004.html
Last modified 5/11/2005 by SOS