CELT | Good Practice Exchange
Transcript for Diagnostic Writing Exercise with Dr Stephen Berwind
‘I'm Dr Stephen Berwind and I am a Senior Lecturer in Drama at MMU Cheshire and the unit that we have been talking about is 'Texts, Contexts and Histories 1'.
The Diagnostic Writing Exercise, which we do about half way through the first term in the first year... our experiences from feedback from students is that one of their great anxieties has to do with writing.And so by giving them an early, diagnostic, not graded assignment it gives us an opportunity to evaluate their work, to see students who may need remedial work, and point them towards that remedial work now before they actually do an assessed piece of work.
[What is involved?]
It is a very simple 500 word essay. We ask them to read an introduction to one set of their class texts and to summarise it; pointing out two of the main arguments made in that introduction and explaining how the author supports their argument.
[What do you learn from the exercise?]
What is useful is, 1, can they write a sentence? Can they write a paragraph? If they can't, right away to learning support. [2] We learn can they answer the question. In the exam that they take one of the problems that many students have is that they give us a lot of information around an answer but don't actually answer the question. So we want to point them in the idea of getting ready to answer questions. [3] And further, to look at how an argument is constructed in an essay because that is something that we will be asking them to do as well when they write essays in the second term. They get tutorial support before they write it. They get tutorial support after they write it. They get very detailed and individualised feedback.
Students who we do think need support… I explicitly say 'you need to see writing support.You need to take the Writing Project'. Sometimes I'll say they need to talk to one of our Student Experience Tutors because not everybody is terrible and not everybody is terrific.There are a lot of people in the middle who could use some help but don't necessarily need to take an entire remedial class and we try to point students in all of those directions.
[What are the benefits of doing the Diagnostic Writing Exercise for your students?]
Short term, it gets more of our student through this without having to re-sit. It gets them then ready for the rigours of the second year.Because our goal is not that they going to be wonderful writers at the beginning of the year. It is that they will be competent writers at the end of the year.
We definitely have students who will come back and say to us 'Oh, I can now write an essay because of the time that you took with me'. I can think of a specific student who was really just barely passing in written work in year 1, who in year 2 suddenly developed the ability to write solid 2:1 essays and in year 3 is now thinking 'oh yes, my written work is actually better than my performance work'. In year 1 he would have regarded that as in impossibility. So, yes, I think the sophistication of thinking, the topics that get undertaken in year 3, all of those come out of the ground work that we lay in year 1.’