Strategies to Support Student Writing
Summary: The following presents numerous ways to integrate writing across the disciplines, paying particular attention to journal writing--
-Joe Moxley
So far, I have tried to offer a theoretical basis for WAC and
really a view of learning that argues for using a particular kind
of writing, the expressive, the speculative or the personal,
across the disciplines because of the critical role language can
play in helping students construct an understanding of content.
In this portion of the workshop, let's look at a variety of
strategies for incorporating writing-to-learn into classes. What
I will show you are a series of discipline-specific examples from
the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. These examples
should give you a sense of the range of possibilities, or they
may trigger other ideas for using writing to learn in your
discipline.
Place a Value on Writing/Show How Writing Promotes Thinking
Suggestions for Using Journals
Some instructors have used journals as a regular feature of
their classes. Journals are the places where students examine
course content more deeply, where they try to connect content or
to see relationships, or where they may simply try to explain
what they are learning to themselves in their own language.
Sometimes instructors will assign a focus for students' journal
writing. Sometimes instructors will plan a semester's worth of
speculative assignments. Other instructors use journals only
occasionally to help students with what they consider to be the
most challenging course concepts. Still other instructors
encourage students to react to course endings or lectures in any
way they feel useful in their journals, or to record their
progress and the problem they encounter while they work through
course projects.
1. Require students to use three-ring binders for their journals.
2. Explain journal features to your students (dated entries,
appropriate voice or tone, length, purpose).
3. Help students focus their journals entries by asking them to
consider content questions (varied, open, speculative).
4. Keep a journal yourself.
5. Use the journal in class (for discussion, for
"open-journal" tests, for mapping early steps in
lengthier and more formal writing assignments). Connect the
journal to homework and exams.
6. Share samples of other students' journal entries that are
models of what students ought to do in their journals.
7. Respond positively to selected entries.
8. At the end of the term, ask students to index their journals
(supply titles, page numbers and a table of contents).
9. Count, but do not grade
Go to Assign In Class Writings (Skip samples)
Samples
Journals in Physics (Compiled by Verner Jensen, University
of Northern Iowa)
9/21 Explain Newton's 3rd Law to your roommate, including
examples from the real world.
9/24 Explain to your lab partner what friction is, including why
it is sometimes helpful and sometimes a nuisance.
9/26 Describe the concept of momentum to your kid brother.
9/28 Explain why (in the event of a collision) the passenger in a
smaller car is more likely to be injured in the interaction with
a large car.
10/3 Explain to your mother why water stays in a pail when swung
in a vertical circle around your head.
10/8 Explain the differences and similarities between
translational and rotational acceleration.
10/12 Describe the relationship between work and energy including
the different forms of energy.
10/15 What is your understanding of the Law of Conservation of
Energy?
10/17 Describe to your dad the physics related to machines.
10/22 Explain why deserts get hot while islands at the same
latitude remain temperate.
10/24 Describe the demonstrations you saw today on systems of
heat transfer.
10/26 Explain the several methods of heat transfer and discuss
how they apply to the human body.
10/29 Explain to your younger brother why blowing across your
soup or a cup of hot chocolate cools it ‹ include at least
two reasons.
10/31 Discuss the net effect of leaving the refrigerator door
open.
Writing to Learn for Mathematics
1. Contrast direct variation with inverse variation.
2. Explain or define for a student who has hired you as his/her
tutor three measures of central tendency.
3. (After a teacher introduces method of rectangular
approximation of area beneath a positive continuous function,
teacher and students calculated a few simple rectangular
approximation and read about area as a limit of Reimann sum).
Draw a U-shaped lake on the board and ask students to explain to
a high school student with only a ruler and a protractor now to
estimate the area of the lake.
4. Describe a real-life, non-mathematical analogy to the rule:
a-n = 1/an.
a-n = 1/an is an inverse rule so, if any power is raised to
the negative it becomes a fraction, also making it positive. You
inverse what it says, you switch it around.
So, what in life is switched around or inverse (which means that
same thing?)
What can I turn around in my life - yet keep it the same; to mean
the same? (Yet it is non-mathematics)
* relationships
* feelings
* communication - the way I say something or communicate
The english language and communication could easily apply to this
rule. We may change or turn phrases around yet keep their meaning
the same.
Sample Economics Assignments (Designed by Douglas Crowe
of Bradley University and Janet Youga of Illinois State
University)
1. Explanation of a concept: During the class period, a
certain concept has been introduced and explained (e.g.,
opportunity cost, monopoly labor markets, unemployment). At the
end of class, students are given five minutes to explain the
meaning and/or significance of the idea or the term.
2. Illustration of a concept: Teachers should select a
concept they have covered and ask students to draw on their
experiences, observations, or readings to provide an example that
illustrates the idea (e.g., the law of marginal diminishing
returns, how inflation affects someone on a fixed income, how
advertising influences spending or the price of a product).
3. Explanation of an economic issue: Several kinds of
writing are valuable when discussing a controversial issue. You
might ask students to write before the issue is introduced to
discover the correctness of their prior knowledge or their
misconceptions. You could ask them midway through the lesson to
monitor their comprehension and perhaps capture the development
of a more sophisticated understanding of the issue. After the
discussion, they could be asked to take a stand on the issue and
justify their opinion based on what they have just learned.
Another tactic is to have the students record their opinions
before the lesson and have them analyze it afterwards.
4. Explanation of a graph: Copies of a graph would be
distributed or displayed on the overhead projector. Students
would then to be asked to explain what the graph means (e.g., if
a teacher distributes a graph of a purely competitive firm with
accompanying cost curves, students could describe the
profit-maximizing behavior of the firm and any long-term
implications for the industry).
5. Explanation of quantitative material: Students could be
given a formula or set of figures and asked to interpret them
(e.g., MV = PQ: Students would describe the classical. Keynesian,
or monetarist view of this equation and its implication for
monetary policy).
6. Identification/explanation of economic issues in newspaper
articles: An article could be distributed (or displayed) and
read aloud to the class. Students would look over the piece again
and identify or explain the economic issues relevant to the
article's topic.
7. Journals or notebooks: Some teachers prefer that
students keep all their short writings in a journal or notebook.
Students can then be encouraged to add to the journal on their
own whenever they need to work out a problem or an idea, want to
keep a list of questions about the material, or want to keep
notes of anything they see, read, or experience that has economic
implications. The entries encourage students to become observers
and recorders of economic issues and events. This can be
especially valuable in principles courses where students are
discovering the relevance of economics to their own lives.
8. Summaries: The ability to summarize is needed to
complete other forms of writing ‹ essay tests, notes,
analyses, research papers, critiques ‹ and is, therefore, a
valuable skill. Students should be asked to select main points
from subpoints.
B) Assign In-class Writing: Admit Slips, Exit Slips, and Focusing Slips
Admit Slips are brief written responses (which fit on a
half sheet of paper) often collected as tickets of
"admission" to class. These are collected and read
aloud by the teacher with no indication of the authorship of
individual statements.
The exit slip technique invites students to spend the last
five minutes of class time writing about the two or three most
important things they have learned that class have been, or
writing questions they have about the content that the professor
has presented so far. This writing-to-learn activity is
particularly powerful in helping students monitor the academic
health of the class. It often happens that our students don't
know what they don't know because they haven't tried to
articulate their understanding. When you ask them to explain
the two or three most important things they have learned during
class, they have a chance to see for themselves how well they
control the content you have covered.
You may collect these summaries periodically to get an overview
of the students' learning in your course well before major exams,
which usually give us and the students that same information,
only too late. Or you may ask a few students to read their
summaries to begin your next class as a way to review and to
monitor their understanding at the same time.
Another "exit slip" idea is to invite students to
spend the last few minutes of class writing down any questions
they might have about what has been covered so far in the class.
You may want these questions to be written anonymously to
encourage more students to participate in this end-of-class
activity. Some professors place a shoe box near the doorway of
their classrooms so that students can drop their notes or
questions into the box on their way out of class. This procedure
enables professors to then either begin the next class by
answering the most frequently asked questions, and/or by making
up a ditto that listed questions and answers for as many
questions as he could handle. Students whose questions seemed to
indicate profound misunderstanding of course content can be
encouraged to see the professor during the office hours or to
work with a tutor on campus for intensive help.
Exit slips and summaries are easy write-to-learn actives that
work well in most courses and aid both the teacher's and the
students' learning processes. They create a feedback loop, a way
of monitoring learning, and also serve as opportunities for
students to understand and review course content.
Focusing Slips can be used to ask students to write in the
middle of a class about an idea or problem related to the lecture
or discussion. EXAMPLE: "Reflect on the notion that Karl
Marx is a philosopher rather than a scientist." Or use this
focusing activity to "balance" class discussions which
one or two students seem to dominant.
This strategy is useful when your purpose as an instructor is
to encourage students to track patterns, similarities, or
differences in course content, or when you want them to reflect
upon their problem-solving abilities or upon especially difficult
reading passages such as those one might find in a philosophy
course. Now not all double-entry notebook assignments would
necessarily turn into a formal, finished piece of writing to
communicate, but you can see how inviting students to participate
in such speculative, ungraded writing could not only promote
greater understanding of the literature being studied, but could
also ultimately lead to a well considered formal essay, if that
is what the instructor desired.
A micro-theme is just what its name implies: it is a kind of
writing which tries to state a point or a thesis in a very short
space. In fact, instructors who use micro-themes ask students to
purchase 5X8 index cards and to type only that information that
will fit on the card. This constraint puts pressure on students
to deliver precise and specific information in response to some
cure the instructor may offer; it also encourages students to
make decisions about focus, relevance, and evidence that can not
only help them with understanding course content, but may also
help them practice important skills that may be incorporated in
the formal writing they might do for a course. Micro-themes
work especially well for those occasions when the instructor's
goal is to encourage students to interpret information, develop a
point of view, and then support their point of view in an
argument. Micro-themes are also useful when instructors want
students to learn to examine and interpret data, to make sense of
the tables and charts that the students as social scientists, for
example, may need to make sense of.
WAC Resource Page
Handling the Paperload