WRT 290

My teaching philosophy is based around the idea that everyone learns differently and assessment should accommodate for those differences. In writing specifically, I think that students should be taught a writing structure as a baseline, but then as they grow and become more comfortable in their writing, be encouraged to deviate and create their own unique writing style. I think that we focus so much on formality and basic structure, rather than actual content far too often. I don’t want my students to look at writing as a formula that they plug information into, but a creative tool for them to express their ideas and understanding. 

In order for students to step outside of the guidelines and create unique pieces of writing, they need to feel safe and comfortable to experiment and try new things. I know that when I was in high school, I never liked when we had to do creative writing, like poetry or short stories, because I didn’t feel comfortable enough to try something new. There is always the fear that a teacher or students  will make fun of you or your work. I don’t want my students to feel that way about their writing. I want them to feel safe and secure and to support one another as peers to create the right kind of environment. 

Introduction

        College preparedness is a skill that many high schools try to give their students to assure that when they do reach the college level, they will excel. However, many high schools tend to fail their students on the writing end – not preparing them for academic writing at the college level. Unfortunately, secondary education is mostly managed through the government. Whether it be local and state government, or aid from the federal government, real change to this problem of college preparedness is difficult to occur in the short term. This is why we have chosen to focus on what the college level is doing to prepare students in writing to counteract the problems its students face. More specifically, we have chosen to examine York College of Pennsylvania.

        In our research, we have encountered three main problems. The first is when looking at standards from schools most likely to send their students to York College based on proximity, an extreme disconnect between college and high school standards has become apparent.

A recent study (2008) found the following:

Nationally, 30 percent of first year students in 2- and 4-year institutions lack the basic skills needed to enter [college] and are instead required to take developmental courses in math, writing or reading (Cohen, p. 21).

        The second was in almost every study done to determine preparedness at the college or high school level; the students’ own opinions are not taken into account. This may not seem important at first glance, but most of these studies only focused on the unequal standards. However, they did not have opinions from students currently enrolled in college. This is where our study would be different, and would allows us to see if students think they are prepared for college and if that matches in their academic achievement.

        The third problem we found was that the current reforms to secondary education are not working to help students prepare for college. Miles McCrimmon discusses the reforms to standardize writing instruction in secondary education has not been consistent with what postsecondary institutions require (2005, p. 248). This is precisely why we have chosen to examine what colleges are doing to prepare their students for academic writing. The current reforms are not working, and immediate action from postsecondary schools is a necessity to ensure students excel in their academic discourses.

Methods

Participants

The study intends to examine freshmen students at York College of Pennsylvania, particularly those required to the take the recently-implemented FCO105 course. The selection of around one-hundred participants should be done randomly. However, it will be necessary to balance this population by York College’s educational departments. This is because there are varying levels of writing experience and comfort by academic major; we anticipate a nursing student to write for different purposes and display different confidence levels than what an English major would have. Dividing participants by department can be beneficial to the interpretation of the study’s results. Based upon the groups of students’ averages, the instructors of each department can hopefully utilize the findings to address their curriculum, especially within higher-level courses where they need to anticipate what abilities their students will exhibit.

Instruments

Since our overarching research question is to better understand students who are entering academic writing, the methods used for the study must focus on gauging the feelings and the past knowledge of the participants. The study would incorporate mixed methods of data collection to gather both qualitative and quantitative figures. A combination of surveys and interviews would be the most suitable method for obtaining the proper data. The conclusions drawn from each of these methods should identify where students are falling short, or what they feel they are lacking when it comes to the requirements of college-level communication.

The surveys that would be given out to participants would aim to discover the general sentiments and abilities of first-year writers. This instrument would supply quantitative data to better determine the problem areas this study hopes to address. The survey would incorporate a mix of multiple-choice or checklist answers, as well as likert-scale responses. Students would select answers based upon what they have previously learned about academic writing; for example, what citation formats they have learned, or what assignments and papers have been introduced to them. Their answers would build a picture of what concepts their high school education has touched on. The likert-scale questions, using a scale of the respondent’s confidence on a range of 1 through 5, would more closely examine the level of expertise that a student thinks they possess. These questions would borrow off the learning outcomes of the FCO105 course. For example, queries about how confident one feels about writing for a professional audience in their field, or a respondent’s perceived capability in utilizing and navigating research databases, would potentially give an average score that shows the comfort level of students in academic writing. About one-hundred surveys, all of which would be anonymous, should provide sufficient information about the abilities of first-year writing students.

The interviews, conducted after the surveys, would look to sit down with volunteer survey respondents and ask them more specifically what activities they did in high school, and their confidence performing those assignments. Qualitative data from this method should find key talking points and areas of concern. Their answers hope to elaborate beyond numeral statistics, and focus on the emotions, processes and perhaps frustrations of students as they were taught certain skills for college preparedness. These interviews especially require ethical treatment of the participants. The questions should not ask for what grades students received or what faults they feel guilty of. However, the interviews should encourage honesty to avoid glossing over any particular knowledge they want to know. Maintaining anonymity, at least in the reporting of the findings, can potentially ensure this. About a dozen interviews should gather enough data to determine what students think about the demands of college-level writing courses.

In order for this study to conclude whether the FCO105 course is doing enough to prepare students, it is essential that these surveys and interviews be administered both before the course and after completion to the same students. This is to find what abilities students come into the course with and what they possess afterward. Since this study can potentially refine the outcomes of the class, performing this study at different times should clearly discover if students are progressing from the outset.

Conclusion

Results

After concluding this study, we hope to identify how well the FCO objectives serve students, where they succeed, and where they fall short. As this is a new class, we want to ensure that the course is meeting the set objectives and that afterwards, students feel prepared for further academic writing. Where other studies have evaluated student progress on the quantitative level, our study hopes to acquire information about how students perceive their progress and success in this course. We want to not only see that students are demonstrating these learning objectives, but that they also feel confident and prepared to do so again in the future when applied to other courses and other papers. If students feel prepared in one area, we will know what to keep the same, while areas that students feel they are less prepared for can be modified to be more effective.  

Limitations

This study will focus solely on York College students, rather than students from many universities. Further research could be done into looking at other institution, they way we have done, or looking more broadly at several universities. Another limitation to our study is that we focused on Pennsylvania high school standards in our research about the disconnect that may be occurring between high school and college. High school standards from other states may change this. This study is also based on student participation, openness, and honesty. If students are not not completely open and honest, we may not obtain accurate information about how well the FCO class is going and what needs to be improved or maintained.

References

Cohen, M. (2008). Improving College Preparation. New England Journal Of Higher Education,

22(5), 21-23.

McCrimmon, M. (2005). High school writing practices in the age of standards: Implications for

Handbook Entry

While the three of us did research on the FCO105 course, one of the largest issues we encountered was students’ ability to check for credible sources. Mostly, students were unfamiliar with how to determine if a source was credible enough, and what constitutes a credible source. The learning objective we felt would address this issue the best was learning outcome 6: “You will demonstrate a course-level-appropriate ability to locate, use, acknowledge, and synthesize appropriate, credible content/evidence from sources to support and enrich your communication-related work.”

        While looking at this learning outcome, we decided the best assignment that would encompass finding credible sources, evaluating them, and synthesizing them with the student’s own work would be an annotated bibliography. Building up to this annotated bibliography would be several lessons including take-home work for the students to complete and would be due in class. These lessons would be about how to create an annotated bibliography, how to properly format one in MLA, how to find sources, and how to check for credibility of sources.

        Using Bloom’s Taxonomy, we were able to create an assignment that would not only check for lower order thinking such as recalling the content and demonstrate understanding, but also higher order thinking that would ask students to analyze and evaluate as well. For example, the students’ annotated bibliographies would show their understanding of MLA formatting. However, the assignment also asks them to analyze their sources in summative paragraphs and evaluate them for credibility. We think this assignment will be a great tool for the FCO105 course that would help students in not only this course, but future courses they take at York College.

Recipe for the lesson

1. Log on to Nearpod and have students sign into your session on their devices.

2. Once they are all on, go through the presentation.

      a. The first two slides lay out what students will be doing going forward in the semester.

     b. The third slide introduces the topic. Explain to students how this presentation will be relevant to their final project.

     c. Students will answer a question that asks them what they think makes a source credible. This allows you to get a baseline of where your students understanding is about source credibility.

     d. The following slide outlines what points on source credibility you will be going over during the lesson

     e. Author Slide: This slide outlines what students need to look for in terms of the author. Go over each point and expand on why each is important to understanding source credibility.

     f. Date Slide: This slide goes over what students need to pay attention to regarding the date of the source. During this portion of the presentation, you want to discuss how recent a source should be, how the topic may impact the date, and what primary and secondary sources are.

     g. Date Quiz: Allow students time to complete the short quiz. Go over the answers and focus on any questions that students got wrong. Take the time to allow students to ask questions about anything they didn’t understand or struggled with.

     h. Affiliated Organization Slide: This slide tells students to pay attention to who published the work. Remind them that some site are credible than others, what to still pay attention to who published it and whether it was published somewhere else prior.

     i. Peer Review/ Scholarly Slide: This slide goes over the importance of peer reviewed and scholarly sources. Tell students how to find scholarly peer reviewed sources. Mention that students should see if their sources was cited by others.

     j. Red Flags Slide: This goes over miscellaneous things to check if a source is usable, such as spelling and conventions, discipline specific language, listing of author, and the site they used (such as wikipedia). Remind students that no author doesn’t immediately rule out a source, but to be aware.

3. Handout: This is a tool for students to use to check their sources for credibility as they go. They have a box to check off that they checked for that, and there are yes or no boxes to check off that say whether the source has or does not have that. Students will be reminded to check for credibility and students will be able to see overall whether a source is usable or not.

Lesson Reflection/Rationale

To have students understand how to evaluate sources for credibility, we thought it would be important to show them the basic guidelines of what good information looks like. The lesson for this day was structured to provide students a method to find suitable sources for their annotated bibliographies at the end of the unit. We introduced this lesson with a question to each student what credibility looks like to them; we understood that students came into a first-year writing course with different understandings about what appears to be credible information. Their responses demonstrated awareness that not every book or webpage they find is instantly accurate. Our presentation hoped to refine their research, including certain aspects of trustworthy articles given by our slides. Authors were listed first, because we felt that it was vital to know who the individual is providing the information. For the date of publishing, we thought we made a clear distinction that it should be considered based on either a primary or secondary source. The quiz provided after the date slide worked well to assess students’ understanding of this concept; they all made correct answers together. Supplementary rules like checking for affiliated organizations and red flags were given to help finalize a decision to use a source.

March 22nd with Juliana

Over the course of this semester, we have encountered many new and challenging ideas and concepts that have helped me to form a more concrete idea of what teaching writing really means. I intend to be a high-school English teacher, which makes many of these ideas and opinions very relevant to my somewhat immediate future. I think that a teacher is more than just a transfer-er of knowledge. They are a guide to helping students find their own ideas, styles, and passions. I think that in order to accomplish this effectively, a teacher must be open to different interpretations and ideas. In my own experience, nothing stunts growth and development more than a teacher who says they only accept one way of doing something, and that is their way. Every student learns different, thinks differently, and has their own way of accomplishing tasks. I think that the best kind of teacher is the one who presents a model or guide for students that they can other follow exactly, or make their own unique modifications. Some students do not have the same background and may not have a preference on, for example, how to organize research, while others may have their own system that works well for them. An example of this that I have first hand experience with is how to organize research. In high school, my English classes had a specific format and rules that had to be followed while doing research. We were taught how to fill out note cards that were categorized a certain way. While this method would have been great to introduce to a freshman class, after that point, everyone should have been able to make their own modifications to their research organization. This was not the case. For three years, that method was required while doing research. It wasn’t until my senior year that a teacher finally said that we have been researching for four years, we know what works and doesn’t for us and that as long as we have a way to organize it, we could chose how to go about that. I wish that had been done my sophomore year of high school rather than my senior year. Schools, and some teachers, spend so much time standardizing and regulating student learning and writing processes instead of really helping each student reach their full potential. We should, as educators, give students tools, show them how to use them, and then let them choose how they are going to build the table, rather than giving them an Ikea kit to assemble. Though that way is easy and standard, it is not the best way to build real skill. Teaching writing is no different. S student should be knowledgeable enough and have enough guidance that they can figure things out in their own way, comfortably and confidently. Not every table should look the same or be built the same way, the way Ikea furniture is.

“Good teaching is being accepting of student ideas and opinions, keeping in mind how each student learns and makes connections, and allowing students to shape their own learning.” This was the statement that I put on my sun during class. I chose three theories to connect this to; process pedagogy, critical theory, and multiple literacy theory. Most of my practices involved catering to student learning and growth. One example that I came up with specifically was assigning them buddies to look over their work. I think that this would go beyond just being helpful for the writer, but I think that it would help the reader to better understand different viewpoints and ideas about the same topic. I also think that allowing students to vote or individually choose how they want to learn or handle a unit or lesson is very important. Expecting every student to demonstrate knowledge and understanding in the same way is absurd. I think that students should have more of a choice of how they want to show me that they have learned and understand the material. If I have a student how learns best through music, having them write a song and explain their thinking would be a great way to allow them to demonstrate understanding, as opposed to making them all take the same test at the end of a unit.