Table Of Contents
Stimulating written output
Written assignments in general presuppose effective reading skills, but they do not directly test those skills or provide feedback on them.
A way to do this is to require students to write summaries or critiques of texts they have to read. Graded and returned with appropriate feedback, these can give the students a sense of the direction in which they need to develop.
One of the lecturers interviewed for this project, concerned about her students' difficulty with reading, and the lack of criticality in their reading, did precisely this – at some cost to herself, but with substantial benefit to her students:
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… I sat down and I said "OK, they’re not reading, how can I get around this?" So I decided what I'd do was select those readings that were seminal or significant for various reasons to the curriculum. Then what I asked them to do was – and this was an idiotic idea – I asked them to do one a week for ten weeks – one critique on an article [each week] for ten weeks. That was fine until I had 450 of them to mark in ten weeks, along with their essays and case studies!
But I can tell you this much, their level of performance improved in enormously after about Week 3. We had 4 classes running at once, and the other sessional staff were doing the exactly the same; and we found that we were failing a large portion of them in Weeks 2, 3, 4. Thereafter, they start to get the hang of it, started to demonstrate their comprehension, started to include more evaluative, more judgement in terms of their writing. They were improving their writing skills along the way.
So by Week 10, after a mountain of marking, they actually started to produce far better work. And we thought we were doing them a favour, too, in making them read, even if it was only for a few marks for each one; but forcing them to read, and therefore forcing them to structure sentences, and to start to put a structure around a critique. So that was the way we adapted [our teaching], to try to get better results from the students; and generally speaking, the cohort in the last semester, was better in terms of their written outcomes.
It killed us last semester! So we sort of dropped back to six this semester, and I picked – but one of them was one of those lengthy 38-page case studies; which was clever: it meant, that not only did they critique it, but when they arrived at class, and you started to talk about responses to change, and reactions to change, and that resistance can occur at all levels of the organization – they knew what you’re talking about, because they had had to read it and critique it and write about it. So they could talk about it. So it actually enhanced what we did in class. But as I say, it was an absolute killer!
— Lecturer, Economics