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Supporting College Level Literacy Design Process Home Resources Standards Inspiration About the Author |
Design Process
Initially, the focus of my study was on my own students and increasing science literacy. I knew my students needed additional help to learn to develop their critical thinking skills and to improve their writing. However, like many science teachers, I felt ill-equipped to teach writing in the context of a science class.
As my perspective broadened from individual science students and teachers to my school as a whole, I realized that many schools might benefit from the process I had undertaken. |
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My district emphasizes the 4Cs: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking. These critical 21st century skills are well-grounded in research.
Leo Vygotsky, in his constructivist theories about learning, maintained that learning is most likely to occur when students work together on a task to problem solve and thus arrive at a shared understanding. Most studies that are grounded in this framework support the understanding that learning depends on active, social interaction, often with a more skilled partner who understands some of the task at hand. These studies show that students who work in this collaborative manner tend to have better outcomes than those who work independently, especially when properly scaffolded. Based on this idea, I designed my study to examine the effects of scaffolded peer review on students' content and writing skills. But it grew into so much more. |
As I delved deeper into the research, I began to realize that the problem was much broader than my own subject. It wasn't just science students who needed better instruction, or science teachers who needed better scaffolds and more efficient assessment methods. Students needed to focus on the core ability of writing to build arguments, evidence, and analyses in multiple subjects. Schools needed an effective and efficient method to track and compare student writing samples across content areas, so that literacy skills as a whole could be improved. My audience broadened from my own students to science teachers, then to the school as a whole.
Since my school was piloting the College Readiness Assessments, this was a perfect opportunity for me to do just that: design a method to collect, preserve, and compare student writing samples across the school as a whole.
Since my school was piloting the College Readiness Assessments, this was a perfect opportunity for me to do just that: design a method to collect, preserve, and compare student writing samples across the school as a whole.
Prototype
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SITE Model Mindmup
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Snapshots from Design Journal
Implementing College Readiness Assessments School-wide
Ultimately, this led me to develop protocols for school-wide implementation of CRAs. I ended up making a presentation at the New Technology Annual Conference (NTAC 2015) in Chicago about it.