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Write Through The Semester
Report for English Subject Centre and Keele Innovations Fund
Susan Bruce,
Keele University,
29th September, 2003
Write Through The Semester
Report for English Subject Centre and Keele Innovations Fund
Organisation is another notion which this portfolio has lead [sic] me to discover. For example the portfolio instructs that week 6 requires “a plan of your assessed essay”. My jaw fell in utter disgust along with the rest of the student nation on receiving such a blow. Surely week 6 is intended for far more testing activities in creation such as constructing skyscrapers out of beer cans as opposed to a sterile essay plan, my heart sank. However, the truth of it is that as a result of the portfolio my essay began in week 6 and was completed in plenty of time (at least not the night before!). Such planning ahead is now firmly embedded within my student moral principles (along with never refusing a free drink and always using a tea bag at least twice). Another advantage in this early bird approach was plenty of time in which to do other work which I didn’t start in week 6 (and in retrospect perhaps should have) ... (47)[1]
I have a complete lack of knowledge about many of the later plays, but it is all right because I know how to evaluate a website … it is a futile way of making me work. The Education system has constantly disappointed me, by forcing me into restrictive ways of performing tasks. This … has destroyed my creativity and stifled any talent that may have been growing. It is only recently that I have gained the confidence to shake off the shackles of an oppressive education and stand up for what I think. These methods of working that are forced upon us students in the form of this ‘portfolio’ just serve to aid in the corruption of free-flowing thought … This method … has caused my level of competency of essay writing to regress somewhat … I have probably reduced the number of marks available to me by not supporting the course, but I do feel much better for venting my annoyance. (26)
I had received a first on my [previous semester’s] essay … and believed the portfolio would be a waste of time … However after the first five weeks my opinion began to change … [My peer group was not working well so] in order to … receive some response to my essay I exchanged work with my friend who is also on the course, but not in my group … [WTTS] has made me appreciate that at this level, we are all able to contribute some level of original thought to the work that we do. (18)
Table of Contents.
1. Description of the Project 4
2 Description of the Evaluation of the Project 5
3. Conclusions of the Evaluation of the Pilot Year 6
3.1 Mid-Semester Questionnaire. 6
3.2 Reflective Essay 6
3.3 Focus Groups 9
3.4 Tutor Interviews 10
4 Conclusions of Pilot Year Evaluation and Amendments to the project in its second year. 11
4.1 Tutor Involvement 11
4.2 Peer Group Evaluation 13
4.3. Peer Commentary 14
4.4. Scheduling of WTTS 14
4.5 Relation of Assignments to Content of Module 14
4.6 Main Benefit of WTTS 15
5 Final Comments 16
Appendix One: detailed Results of mid-semester evaluation 19
Appendix Two: Reflective Essay Evaluation: Detailed Results and detailed student comments 21
Appendix Three: Proformas for Self/ Peer Assessment 26
Write Through The Semester
Report for English Subject Centre and Keele Innovations Fund
1. Description of the Project.
Write Through the Semester is an Introductory Writing Course which aims to help students improve the literary skills so many of them currently lack on entry to HE, and thereby allow academics to spend more time on content and less on form in their responses to their students' writing. Research suggests that student writing improves most markedly when writing tasks are linked directly to the students' discipline(s), and that students engage most effectively with individual tasks when the relation of those tasks to an end product is clear. We tried, therefore, to develop a model which would be embedded in a specific discipline, piloted in a module in English, yet adaptable to the requirements of other disciplines inside and outside our own institution. There were, however, a number of difficulties which needed to be taken into account in planning the course. Self-evidently, improvement in students' writing demands that they write regularly, often, and reflectively. But there are only very limited extra resources available to invest in the teaching of such skills, and, currently, none to be invested in any extra marking of student work. Similarly, student time is also limited and consideration must be paid to the danger of producing for the students an excessive workload. The challenge then was to formulate a writing course which would:
· be directly related to the material the student is studying in a given module;
· get students writing weekly;
· encourage students critically to reflect on the act of writing on an ongoing basis;
· encourage students to evaluate their writing and the writing of others on an ongoing basis;
· avoid an excessive workload for the students taking the course;
· bear an obvious relation to the end product of that module (the assessed essay);
· be rewarded at a level commensurate with the effort expended on the assignments by the students;
· operate insofar as is possible with minimal weekly intervention from tutors;
· result in a comparable marking load to that generated by more conventional modes of assessment;
· avoid, insofar as is possible, inflation or deflation of average grades for the module as a whole (this is also important for the assessment of any change in the quality of student writing).
Our solution to these problems was to devise a series of short assignments, which have intrinsic --and collateral-- value in themselves, but which also build up progressively to the submission of a first draft of an assessed essay at the beginning of the second half of the module, and then, by a series of peer- and self-evaluations, to a revision of the assessed essay. The final assignment in the initial year of the project was a short reflective essay, which evaluated the usefulness of the project from the student's point of view. Throughout the semester, students were required to exchange their writing, every week, with two (or in some cases three) of their peers, and to deposit copies of their writing in a portfolio which they eventually submitted to their tutor. The mark scheme for the module was devised to ensure that students could not pass the module without submitting the complete portfolio but were also rewarded for the work they did in completing it. The mark scheme devised ensured that tutors awarded marks only for qualities they already felt comfortable in judging (in this case, for example, hard work; and the argumentative essay); and that any change to the average grade of students taking the course would reflect change in the quality of their writing.
2 Description of the Evaluation of the Project.
The project was extensively evaluated in the first year. We tried to maximise the objectivity of the evaluation by embedding in the project’s plan a clear distinction between the person responsible for devising and instituting WTTS (Susan Bruce) and the person responsible for evaluating its success (Monica McLean). In addition, we hired contract researchers to undertake substantial statistical analysis of the students’ responses to WTTS, as well as to conduct focus groups and interviews with those who were teaching on the course in 2002.
The evaluations undertaken were as follows:
1. A mid-semester questionnaire, distributed to all students in class around week 6, which aimed to ascertain: the use the students had made of the Handbook; their level of confidence about their writing prior to taking WTTS, and after it; what they liked and did not like about WTTS; whether any problems were occurring with its delivery (and if so, what they were).
2. An obligatory reflective essay as the final course assignment, entitled, ‘”Writing this Portfolio was a Complete Waste of Time”: Discuss’. All these essays were read by Susan Bruce. She produced a chart detailing what she thought were the most common remarks, with the help of which a contract researcher analysed all the essays and drew the information together into statistical conclusions.
3. Focus Groups were conducted (by our contract researchers) with all of the tutorial groups involved with WTTS in its pilot year.
4. Interviews with all tutors teaching on Elizabeth Tragedy (2 f/t staff members; 2 postgraduate teaching assistants) were conducted by one of the contract researchers, using questions devised by Monica McLean.
3. Conclusions of Evaluation of Pilot Year
3.1 Mid-semester Questionnaire.
Detailed results of the answers the students gave to the questionnaire are available in Appendix one. The most notable results were in the area of the students’ perception of their confidence in their writing skills; in the students’ engagement with the course handbook; and in their reaction to the optional workshops.
Confidence. The students’ confidence in their writing skills appeared to be significantly improved by having taken the course. Thus whilst 54% of the respondents said that they felt ‘confident’ or ‘very confident’ about their writing skills on entering HE, and 57% said that they felt ‘confident’ or ‘very confident’ after completing the English Department’s Introductory course, 85% of the students said that they thought that they would feel ‘confident’ or ‘very confident’ after completing WTTS. Just as marked were the relative percentages of students who felt that their anxieties about writing had been substantially alleviated by WTTS. 23% of students felt ‘anxious’ or ‘very anxious’ about their writing on entering HE. This rose to 28% of the cohort after they had taken the Introductory course. But only 2% of the students felt that they would feel ‘anxious’ after completing WTTS, and none replied to this question with ‘very anxious’. It would seem then, that the most substantial benefit in terms of confidence in their ability to write was afforded to those students who were anxious about their writing skills (the numbers of those who said they ‘didn’t really think about it’ remained pretty constant between semester one and semester two).
The Handbook. A markedly high percentage of the students (93%) stated that they had read through the entire handbook (and thus would at least have read material on punctuation; on how to present an essay correctly; on assessment of the quality of their own and others’ essays and so forth). Of the 7% who said that they had not read through the handbook, most had read the relevant sections to each assignment, and some had skimmed the handbook.
The Workshops. Together with Claire Slater-Mamlouk of the University’s Skills Centre we had scheduled two optional workshops for the students. Take-up for these was very disappointing, so poor that we were in the end only able to run one workshop (on thesis sentences; only 7 students turned up to this). According to the results of the mid-semester questionnaire, however, only 15% of the students had actively decided not to go. Most of the rest either intended to go, or were prohibited from doing so through time-table clashes, part-time jobs, or poor time management. (Those who did attend the workshop, incidentally, all said on their evaluation forms that it had been useful to them).
3.2. Final Reflective Essay.
The most extensive statistical analysis came from the analysis of the reflective essays. The students were in this assignment free to mention or not mention anything they wanted to within the terms of the essay and thus the percentages mentioning a particular aspect of the course should be understood differently than they would be had a student specifically been asked to comment on a particular aspect of WTTS (as in a questionnaire, for instance). Many students, for example, chose to structure their essays around the series of assignments which they had been given. Thus 93% mentioned the website reviews (which accounted for the first batch of assignments), whilst only 40% specifically mentioned having to revisit their Yr1 first semester essay (which was only a part of one assignment). 83% of students did not mention the reflective essay itself. So, for instance, the fact that 29% of the students requested more tutor involvement in the course does not imply that 71% of the students did not want more tutor involvement, but rather that 29% of the students actively requested more involvement without any prompting.
Once again, we have given more detailed extracts from the reflective essays in an appendix (Appendix 2), and confined ourselves here to the main conclusions.
· A clear majority of the students thought that overall, writing the portfolio had been beneficial to some degree. 72% of the essays disagreed -- to varying degrees -- with the proposition that writing the portfolio had been a complete waste of time. About 14% of the students thought that it had been a complete waste of time, and about the same percentage were unsure. But of those who said it had been a complete waste of time, a considerable number were contradictory (for example: ‘it was when studying my essay more critically that I realised I had devoted too much space to ‘”Hamlet” in both the main body of the essay and the conclusion, and I then corrected this. In conclusion, although doing the portfolio this semester did have it’s [sic] advantages such as improving my critical abilities, it didn’t really improve my writing skills’ (15)).