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Supporting College Level Literacy Inspiration Home Resources Standards Inspiration About the Author
Leveraging Technology to Support College Level Literacy
Through Secondary Writing Tasks
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It was early in the year, and I'd just received back the first partial lab report that I had assigned to my students. Looking over their submissions, it was glaringly obvious: the vast majority of my students either could not - or would not - write. Leaving aside the typos and grammatical errors, what stood out most to me was that even though the classes consisted of secondary students in the 10th through 12th grades, their papers lacked clear arguments, fundamental descriptions of evidence, or any meaningful analysis of the concepts. In terms of science, most were functionally illiterate. I annotated and passed their papers back for revisions, but even their final submissions showed little improvement. Instead of digging deeper into the concepts, most of the students appeared to simply give up. One students even asked me, "Why do we have to write down all this stuff? This isn't English class!" I wondered, did my students even understand the content if they could not write about it? Was it possible for them to pass the tests (which they did), but fail to understand the concepts? Did it really matter if they understood the concepts when they couldn't effectively communicate their understanding? Perhaps most importantly, what could I do to increase science literacy in my classroom?
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My quest to answer these questions led me investigate how much writing students did in other science classes. I made a casual inquiry of my colleagues on a science listserve, asking "How much writing about science concepts (outside of a standard lab report) do your students do in a typical week?" I received 23 responses, of which 20 ranged from "very little" to "none". Reasons for this included teachers' lack of time to grade, lack of comfort in teaching how to write or in grading "essays", and students' disinterest. One teacher wrote, "Most of my students hate writing. They would rather take a zero than write more than 1-2 sentences about anything."
I began to look into studies on how to teach students to write in science, on student resiliency or willingness to persevere in difficult tasks, and on scaffolds and other activities designed to support students' writing skills. This led me to my initial action research plan, which was designed to test one of the scaffolds (peer review) to see if it helped students to collaborate and be accountable to each other in their writing process.
Ultimately, however, my studies took me past my search for "science" literacy into the broader problem of students graduating high school without college level writing proficiency... not just in science, but across all subjects. I began to wonder how students could move through their classes without learning this critical skill, and this led me to realize how little discourse existed between staff members in different departments at my facility about their students' actual work. The Humanities department was probably looking at samples of their students' writing, but in the Science department, we never heard about it. We certainly never compared samples of our students writing. Concerns about students were spoken of in general terms, but teachers did not compare actual work across subjects. Why would they? It seemed like comparing apples to oranges. But I started thinking, was not all literacy - regardless of content area - grounded in the foundational skills of argument, evidence, and analysis?
And I began to wonder, what might happen if I found a way to track, to measure, and to share evidence of each student's literacy skills among all teachers?
Research“Writing is thinking made manifest. If students cannot think clearly, they will not write well. So in this respect, writing is tangible evidence of critical thinking…” (Goldberg, 2014). We know 21st century literacy is a critical skill, but like all skills, it must be taught, reinforced, and practiced. Click the link to read more...
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Design ProcessInitially, 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. But literacy needs to be supported in all content areas to be effective, and I began to search for a way to support all students. Click the link to read more...
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Support and Next StepsI have been fortunate to receive support from many areas. NapaLearns has been instrumental in providing me with the time and context to pursue this line of inquiry. There are so many others who deserve thanks as well. Click the link to read more...
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