Writing Next
In regards to education, all we hear today is how the education system in the United States is horrible and how education needs to be reformed, especially in regards to adolescent reading and writing skills. Yes, the education system in the United States is absolutely horrible with seventy percent of students in fourth through twelfth grade being labeled as low-achieving writers, with more than seven thousand students dropping out of high school, and with almost one-third of of high school graduates not being "ready" for college-level English composition. As statistics continue to show that low number of students rank on standardized exams as proficient, a question may arise to ask why. Why are reading and writing scores so low? Why in an information-rich world are the majority of students not scoring as "proficient"? And, what can be done to improve this?
In Writing Next, Steve Graham and Dolores Perin come up with eleven, researched strategies that fall under the theory of meta-analysis. Meta-analysis is defined as, "a particularly powerful way of synthesizing and permits the calculation of effect sizes", and these effect sizes help determine how much a strategy using meta-analysis has impacted someone or a group's learning. By using the meta-analysis, researchers developed the eleven elements of current writing instruction that help adolescents with learning and writing. The eleven elements include:
After reading the research on these eleven elements, I realized that these eleven elements are just various strategies that one could use in the classroom to help students in being proficient writers. As stated multiple times in the research, these eleven elements are not a curriculum for teachers, but rather are different strategies teachers can incorporate in their classroom to help students that are not "proficient" in writing so that by the standardized exams' scores these students will show that they are "proficient" in writing. However, as I was reading about these wonderful eleven elements that have shown to help students improve on their writing skills, I could not help but notice how these elements (strategies) revolve around the idea of universal design in that they can help different learners with their writing abilities. Although it is impossible to include all these methods of writing in one writing assignment, it is possible to offer students all of these elements and having them maybe use a few as they are doing a writing assignment for class to help them meet the "proficiency" level.
Although the statistics show that the majority of students in the country are not proficient writers or even readers, that does not go to say that students today are not reading and writing. A statement that I had a problem with in the article was, "it is obvious that if today's youngsters cannot read with understanding, think about and analyze what they've read, and then write clearly and effectively about what they've learned and what they think, then they may never be able to do justice to their talents and their potential". Students today are reading and writing more than they have ever done in the past, but they are not (in this case writing) expressing their thoughts in an academic way because they are so use to writing non-academically, such as text messages and comments on Facebook. Nonetheless, the thoughts are there, and if teachers could focus on transitioning those thoughts from the non-academic writings to the academic writings, then perhaps the number of students that are "proficient" in writing will increase as well.
By using the eleven elements in the classroom, I think that the transition from writing non-academically to academically can be done with the various learners present in the classroom. Statistically speaking, these eleven elements are golden and have shown to help "non-proficient" students increase their writing skills. However, not all elements are going to relate to how a student learns best, and instead of trying to use all of these elements at once for all reading assignments, I think that they should be present for students to pick a couple to help guide them in their writing. Although I disagree with having to teach students specifically on how to pass standardized exams, I do agree that students should be able to be proficient in writing academically, and if students can feel more comfortable with knowing how to practice this in the classroom with being able to choose which strategy helps them the best, then perhaps our future students can help raise the "proficiency" numbers in writing.
I agree Gwen, the use of facebook and twitter comments are detrimental to writing and reading. Too often, students are using improper grammar and misspelling easy words with shorthand. However, after reviewing aspects of Universal Design in my History 320 class I find the approach useful, but strict and difficult to ensure education. Yes, the level of achievement is low according to many sources nowadays and students struggle to read and write effectively. I agree change must occur in order for proper education to begin, but using such an approach is unorthodox. I agree with you that using a few of the eleven examples will help a classroom and be efficient, but using all the steps is pointless. Specific product goals and summation tactics seem useless in most classrooms. Even as history teachers I feel like we do this automatically when teaching documents and analyzing texts. However, sentence combination and prewriting are tactics that I feel are efficient. Students rush to write essays and assignments and do not provide fluid thoughts. If we can focus on pre-writing and proper sentence combination, assignments will be done adequately at least.
ReplyDeleteGwen, I really liked how you linked adolescents' non academic writing to text messaging and social media ways of communication. I think as teachers we should encourage our students to write proficiently. One way we can encourage that is by having them create journals. I think if they can express their thoughts and write about how they feel, they will feel more confident in their writing. Also we can teach them how to write strong theses backed by evidence. I agree with Daniel about Universal Design. We went over it at our HIST 320 class and it can be complicated and hard to implement everything in a class. But I think one of the best ways to help our students with writing is to allow them to write rough drafts and teach them how to proof read their papers.
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