Classroom Research: Discussion of Writing Skills Assessment
The unexpected figures that result from plotting the average class scores for both thesis and use of evidence against assignment number warrant some interpretation. As I have already suggested in the introduction to this study, the positive change in students’ scores for thesis and use of evidence advanced neither linearly nor according to the grade weight or length of the assignment. Rather, students’ improvement in these specific writing skills resembles the figure that traces the temperature of water being heated to the boiling in beginning chemistry, that is to say, the water’s temperature rises steadily until it begins to boil, at which time it levels off to a flat line. The similarities of these graphs lead me to wonder how students’ experience in the L216 class examined here might resemble water being heated to its boiling point.
For the sake of further discussion about the research data about writing skills, let us assume that students invested steady effort in writing each of the four papers throughout the semester. Operating from this assumption, let us then examine the extent to which students improved their writing skills. In the ability to craft and use a complex thesis, students aggregately advanced 1.41 points or 28.2% of the 5-point scale. In the ability to use evidence effectively, students improved .81 points or 27% of the 3-point scale. The remarkable proximity of the percent increase figures for thesis and use of evidence – scores assigned independently of each other by two separate rubrics – in conjunction with improvement graphs that resemble water being heated to its boiling point lead me to some conclusions about how students learned writing skills in the class under examination and also about how I might alter the way I teach writing in L216.
My approach to teaching writing to this class was a whole essay approach, with the class receiving four opportunities to write and practice the same kind of essay, rhetorically speaking. Although I actively taught writing specifics such as paragraph structure, incorporating evidence, and fashioning a strong argumentative thesis, I nevertheless always taught these in the context of improving the entire essay. I offered most of my feedback to students on their first drafts, requiring them to rewrite those drafts for the final graded version. Using this method steadily throughout the semester yielded the “boiling water” curve I have discussed above, suggesting that students only improved a fixed amount in their writing skills when taught by the same whole-essay method all semester. That is to say, once they reached their development potential for the term (around the time they submitted essay III), their improvement leveled off such that essay IV was not significantly better than the one before it.
The results of the writing skills assessments and their interpretation lead me to reflect on how I might alter my teaching strategies in order to yield more skill improvement in future renditions of the course. While I am convinced that it is unrealistic, and perhaps even unfair, to expect students with marginal writing skills to become fully competent writers during the course of one semester, I am similarly convinced that students can advance further and improve in a more linear fashion than did the students whose work was studied here.
The key, I think, is to isolate writing skills early in the semester before asking students to pull those skills together to write an entire essay. The place to start is basic paragraph structure and how to use evidence effectively. Students must first learn to structure paragraphs that are unified, coherent, and developed around solid evidence. Next, they must learn to organize several paragraphs to form the body of an essay. Then, writers need to practice crafting argumentative theses and guiding the reader to them in the first paragraph of the essay. Finally, students will need to pull full essays together and discover effective ways of concluding their work. This method will require some revisions to the course, particularly in the way the assignments are scheduled, but I believe that it will allow the class to explore the same rich topics while at the same time sequencing the acquisition of writing skills so that even more students can make greater gains in their writing skills.