Author: Sherence

In recent times studies have been conducted that looked at the factors that make up the demographic dropout rates amongst students, and particularly in STEM education (Kelly, 2016; Wang & Degol, 2013). What these studies particularly focused on was as to why these dropout rates were so high among women and students from a lower social economic background, and underrepresented groups in the STEM field. Moreover, these studies have revealed that the causes for these dropout rates and the demographic representation in STEM education were explained by environmental factors, and the academic aptitude of the students in question which explained the outcome of student retention rates in STEM (e.g. Wang & Degol, 2013).

 

What kind of a role can WAC play to increase the retention rates amongst certain groups of students? Which of the several causes of the outcome of these studies can WAC strive to improve through writing pedagogy, and by applying active learning tools in the classroom? In other words: what kind of WAC pedagogical tools are successful in raising interest and persistence in STEM education among certain student groups?

 

For instance, the low numbers of female students enrolled in STEM education has been heavily studied in the past decade. As a result, the data that has been generated by these studies can partly account for these low participation rates among this certain demographic of students. Some of these causes have to do with environmental factors andstereotypes about gender and STEM. As a consequence, girls might experience less encouragement and support to excel or to choose STEM-related educational programs and careers. Moreover, parental beliefs and behavior can both promote and discourage students into STEM education (Kelly, 2016; Wang & Degol, 2013). The lack of female role models can also decrease the sense of belonging in STEM for STEM students and students considering STEM education (Blickenstaff, 2005).

Moreover, cultural and societal beliefs, policy and economical and work-related developments should also be considered as an influence on students’ behavior. These last causes for the lower participation rates in the female demographic group are of particular interest as these reflect a certain disconnect of the students’ perceptions of the value of academic tasks and the students’ personal values that shape their experiences in academic contexts (Harackiewicz, 2014). Additionally, this disconnect of the students’ sense of belonging and sense of identity in an academic field one can group under the heading “affective factors”. These factors, as Wang and Degol (2013) assert, reflect a set of added motivational beliefs, such as occupational and life values as an important part of the decision-making process to pursue STEM education or STEM-related careers. Furthermore, it is found that the affective disconnect is higher in girls and students of a lower socio-economic background.

 

How can WAC pedagogy therefore mend this affective gap? One of several ways is to have students adopt several writing strategies in order to have them perform low stakes writing exercises, in which they rationalize their reason for taking certain courses in a STEM-related degree. More specifically, how these courses could aid in realizing certain educational goals, and/or to realize certain life goal projects reflective of one’s political, ethical and societial belief structure. As a result, studies have shown that productivity and retention increases by having students apply this active learning tool. Furthermore, in order to further understand the mechanisms behind the affective factors of belonging in STEM, one can invoke expectancy-value theory (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002), interest theory (Hidi & Renninger, 2006), and self-affirmation theory (Steele, 1988), in order to then construct a pedagogical framework in which WAC could be of assistance in ameliorating this affective gap in more detail.

A part from the aforementioned low stakes writing exercises, these theories can be used to craft specific high stakes writing assignments, such as an end of term paper related to a semester long project in a STEM related course, which would bring out a deeper level of reflection of the students’ individual affective sense of belonging and utility value of the STEM course. The goal of WAC pedagogy here is to construct certain essay prompts, by way of effective assignment design, where students can relate their projects to the ethical, socio-political and personal values of the project they have undertaken on a more engaging level; and as result are therefore more motivated to pursue a degree in a field that they’ve initially dismissed as not having the potential of being a viable career path.

 

 

Blickenstaff, J. C. (2005). “Women and science careers: Leaky pipeline or gender filter?” Gender and Education, 17(4), 369–386

Eddy, S. L., & Brownell, S. E. (2016). “Beneath the numbers: A review of gender disparities in undergraduate education across science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines.” Physical Review Physics Education Research, 12(2)

Harackiewicz, J. M., Canning, E. A., Tibbetts, Y., Priniski, S. J., & Hyde, J. S. (2015, November 2). “Closing Achievement Gaps With a Utility-Value Intervention: Disentangling Race and Social Class”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Judith M. Harackiewicz, Yoi Tibbetts, Elizabeth Canning, and Janet S. Hyde (2014). “Harnessing values to Promote Motivation in Education”. Adv Motiv Achiev; 18: 71–105

Kelly, A. M. (2016). “Social cognitive perspective of gender disparities in undergraduate physics.” Physical Review Physics Education Research, 12(2)

National Science Foundation. (2017). “Women, minorities, and persons with disabilities in science and engineering: 2017”. Arlington, VA. www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/

Wang, M. T., & Degol, J. (2013). “Motivational pathways to STEM career choices: Using expectancy-value perspective to understand individual and gender differences in STEM fields.” Developmental Review, 33(4), 304–340.

Finding what to write about for an essay topic, for a thesis statement or that catchy topic sentence which succeeds in condensing an profound idea as elegantly as possibly, can often come down to knowing that one right word. Mark Twain once remarked that: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning”. As a WAC fellow, and a writing instructor, I’m familiar with this axiom in as far as regarding writing as not being an absolute science which can easily be condensed down to either a right or wrong approach. Using the right word requires a certain level of understanding of a certain “je ne sais quoi”; i.e., which word, which statement, which thesis, which semi-colon is right for the occasion one is writing about. It denotes this constant dance between being an exact science and that of being a philosophy where the final word rests on what constitutes good writing. Additionally, this level of discernment, between almost right  and right is not easily arrived at, and the origins of this difficulty can be historically traced back to the earlier pedagogical philosophies of the early 20^th century.

In his seminal essay entitled “Writing across the Curriculum in Historical Perspective: Toward a Social Interpretation,” David R. Russel illustrates this difficulty by asserting that for a long time, “Writing thus came to be seen as a ding an sich, a separate and independent technique, something that should have been learned elsewhere, taught by someone else-in high school or in freshman service courses. Hence the almost universal complaints about students’ writing and the equally ubiquitous denials of responsibility for teaching it” (55).  As writing instructors, we are trained to take up this mantel of responsibility and have the experience in knowing just how hard it is for students to tread this fine line of what is good writing and what is not; between the right word and the wrong word. As a WAC fellow I’ve always put an emphasis on the fact that to arrive at a definitive answer to this question is to help students find their own voice, whilst still being able to write within an MLA, WAC and WID framework. We as instructors therefore share the responsibility of helping students to define, through their own negotiations, what constitutes good writing. Additionally, it demands more engagement and understanding from the instructors’ side to acknowledge the diverse background of the student body, and as such to take up the task to facilitate the students’ journey towards finding the “right” words, which isn’t always as straightforward as it may seem.

As WAC fellows we’re aware that the initiative has an obligation towards recognizing diversity when it comes to writing instruction. This fact has been stressed by Russel in his seminal essay, wherein he excoriates the academy when he remarks that: “concerted efforts to promote writing in the whole curriculum are at cross-purposes with the modern university’s compartmentalized, bureaucratic structure, its diverse missions, and its heterogeneous clientele” (62). Therefore, a deep understanding is required of how the practice of writing instruction is influenced by these complex, but essential, considerations, which prove to be creating a schism between the curriculum of the Anglosphere and the background of the student body. Moreover, instructors who are applying WAC pedagogy have to be susceptible to the ongoing issues regarding exclusion when being faced with an English language-based curriculum, and the role WAC pedagogy plays in mending this schism.

When further regarding the origins of this divide between the diverse student body and the curriculum Russel illustrates the historical background that provides the origin of this problem, when he claims that:

“From its beginnings, the university adopted Harvard’s current-traditional rhetoric, an ‘inner-directed’ pedagogy [ . . . ] which assumes that writing is a single universally applicable skill, largely unrelated to ‘content’; it ignored the ‘socialized’ rhetoric [ . . .  ], with its ‘outer-directed’ view of pedagogy, which assumes that thinking and language use can never occur free of the social context which conditions them. Writing thus came to be seen as a ding an sich, a separate and independent technique, something that should have been learned elsewhere, taught by someone else in high school or in freshman service courses. Hence the almost universal complaints about students’ writing and the equally ubiquitous denials of responsibility for teaching it.”(55).

This “elsewhere” where students should have a priori acquired an English language-based writing toolbox in order to find the “right” words when writing their college papers is therefore seen as a great misconception. One which we as instructors find ourselves attempting to help bridge the divide between the pre-acquired English language jargon of academic North American English, to that of one which considers a student’s individual habitus. This should all preferably be achieved in a holistic manner as mentioned previously, to help students find their own voice and to guide them on their individual journeys to fine their right words. Moreover, as instructors it becomes our duty to avoid becoming a “writing police”. Historically this became a prevalent pedagogical strategy, in so far as it required as Russel argues:

“faculty in all courses to hand delinquent students over to the English department for correction in a ‘writing hospital’ as it was called, or ‘lab’ as we call it today [ . . . ] Today, many universities carry on the tradition of writing police and remedial lab; faculty prescribe treatment (often high-tech), administered by a staff member or tutor-but rarely by a tenure-line faculty member. Responsibility remains outside the community, drop-out rates are high, and the status quo is preserved.” (64).

The most important thing to realize is that WAC is more than a means of improving pedagogy: it is and always has been part of a complex dialectic which forms curricular, institutional and, ultimately, social policy. The desire end goal of having WAC philosophy dialectically influence social policy would be considered a utopian goal. However, by starting to acknowledge and to bridge the gap between the diverse background of the student body and that of the anglosphere of the curriculum, one can make a start in fostering student learning, and this would lead them to eventually becoming better writers in finding their own “right” words.

Russell, David R. Writing across the Curriculum in Historical Perspective: Toward a Social Interpretation. College English, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Jan. 1990), pp. 52-73.

 

The act of note taking can be viewed as a freewriting, or exploratory writing, exercise. There are different activities one can undertake to promote free writing as an active learning tool and note taking can be viewed as a subset of that among other strategies. It’s important to note that all these different kinds of writing-to-learn low stakes exercises all tackle a different side of the writing-to-learn process the brain engages in. As a result these writing tasks stimulate different parts of the brain. Kellogg (2008) explains that the frontal lobes of the brain, which seldom reach full maturity until age twenty-three to thirty, are needed for complex writing tasks that require writers first to wrestle with advanced, “domain-specific” knowledge and then to read their emerging texts from the audience’s perspective. The strain on working memory can be reduced, Kellogg argues, by earlier scaffolding exercises that encourage students to take notes, generate ideas during pre-writing or to make an outline. These different kinds of tasks apparently activate different parts of the brain.

Another study by biologist James Zull (2002), shows that all new learning must be linked to preexisting neural networks already in the learner’s brain. Teachers can’t simply transfer a concept from their own brains into students’ brains, because a teacher’s neural networks are the products of his or her own life history and don’t exist within the learner’s brain. Consequently, the learner must build the new concepts on neural networks already present. Informal writing assignments aimed at helping students probe memory, connect new concepts to old networks, dismantle blocking assumptions, and help understand the significance of the new concept are particularly valuable. Note taking is therefore the ideal method of adding information to concepts that are already present in neural networks and to connect new concepts to old networks.

One note taking strategy is to, as an instructor, show students the instructor’s own note-taking and responding process. Just as it helps students to see a skilled writer’s rough drafts, it helps them to see a skilled reader’s marked-up text, marginal notations, and note-taking system. Bring in a book or article full of your own margin notes and underlinings, along with entries you made in your note system. Show the students what sort of things you write in the margins. Explain what you underline and why. If your reading is part of a scholarly project, show them how you take notes and how you distinguish between what the author is saying and your own reflections on the material.

Teach students “what it says” and “what it does”. A helpful way for students to understand structural function in a text is to show them how to write “what it says” and “what it does” statements for each paragraph (Ramage, Bean and Johnson, 2009; Bean, Chappell, and Gillam, 2011; Bruffee, 1993). A “what it says “statement is a summary of the paragraph’s content— The paragraph’s stated or implied or implied topic sentence. A “what it does” statement describes the paragraph’s purpose or function within the essay: for example, “Provides evidence for the author’s first main reason,” “Summarizes an opposing view,” “provides statistical data to support a point,” or “uses an analogy to clarify the idea in the previous paragraph.” These “what it does” statements are helpful ways to condense ideas accurately by getting to the core of an argument during the note taking activity.

Another productive method which John C. Bean advocates, is the “marginal notes” approach, where he claims that every time one has the urge to highlight or underline something, one should instead opt to: “write out in the margins why you wanted to underline it. Why is that passage important? Is it a major new point in the argument? A significant piece of support? A summary of the opposition? A particularly strong or particularly weak point?” (Bean 177). The margins should therefore be used to summarize the text, ask questions, give assent or to protest vehemently. The goal here is to get students to carry on lively dialogue with the author in the margins. Additionally, this approach can spark a class discussion if students are asked to read from their margin notes. This strategy promotes an active learning approach wherein the note taking process itself addresses noteworthy problems with the object of study, i.e.:  unclarities and points of interest gradually will manifest themselves in the margin notes. These noteworthy items eventually could lead to compelling research topics, which form the basis of strong research questions.

Another helpful tool when taking note are the “graphic organizers”. For some students representing a text visually is more powerful than representing it through marginal notations, traditional outlining, or even summary writing. Graphic organizers can take the form of flowcharts, concept maps, tree diagrams, sketches or drawings. Robert and Roberts (2008) give their students choices in how they want to represent their deep reading of a text (on a given day students might submit a summary, a page of notes, or even a song) but they particularly recommend graphic organizers.

Another method that benefits this act of active learning quite well in generating a deep creative engagement with the primary text of study is the “Cornell Method,” which takes the following approach:

1. Record: During the lecture, use the note-taking column to record the lecture using telegraphic sentences.
2. Questions: As soon after class as possible, formulate questions based onthe notes in the right-hand column. Writing questions helps to clarify meanings, reveal relationships, establish continuity, and strengthen memory. Also, the writing of questions sets up a perfect stage for exam-studying later.
3. Recite: Cover the note-taking column with a sheet of paper. Then, looking at the questions or cue-words in the question and cue column only, say aloud, in your own words, the answers to the questions, facts, or ideas indicated by the cue-words.
4. Reflect: Reflect on the material by asking yourself questions, for example: “What’s the significance of these facts? What principle are they based on? How can I apply them? How do they fit in with what I already know? What’s beyond them?
5. Review: Spend at least ten minutes every week reviewing all your previous notes. If you do, you’ll retain a great deal for current use, as well as, for the exam.

 

Bean, John C. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing,      Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, 2nd ed. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2011.

Bean, J.C., Chappell, V., and Gillam, A. Reading Rhetorically. (3^rd ed.) New York: Longman, 2011.

Pauk, Walter. “The Cornell Method.” How to Study in College 7/e. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2011.

Ramage, J.D., Bean, J.C., and Johnson. J. The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing. (5th ed.) New York: Longman, 2009.

Roberts, J.C., and Roberts, K.A. “Deep Reading, Cost/Benefit, and the construction of Meaning: Enhancing Reading Comprehension and Deep learning in Sociology Courses.” Teaching Sociology, 2008, 36, 125-140.

Zull, J. E. The art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the biology of Learning. Sterling, Va.: Stylus, 2002.