Our Mission:

Assessment

Basic Writing

Digital Literacy

Researchers: Alie Bultman, Nicole Bunce, Katherine Moua, Jim Hall Faculty Advisors: Dr. Shevaun Watson & Dr. Carmen Manning English Dept University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire

Researchers: Alie Bultman, Nicole Bunce, Katherine Moua, Jim Hall Faculty Advisors: Dr. Shevaun Watson & Dr. Carmen Manning English Dept University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire

Our mission in the project was to investigate best practices and strategies in order to support the implementation of the new Blugold Seminar.

Assessment should be taught as an explicit writing skill, not as an activity but as a skill to teach and learn.

Students can create their own plan for improvement while the professor can help the student make appropriate targets and then both will work towards those goals.

Professors should seek to offer unique and different forms of assessment that incorporate technology

Audio Commentary has proven helpful in student understanding of feedback

Professors should offer both formative and summative assessments.

Formative – informs both instructor and student about student understanding at a point where adjustments may still be made

Summative – used to gauge student learning relative to content standards

Highly important for professors to have a multitude of different assessments to:

Accommodate all learning styles and intelligences

Reach all skill levels Motivate students

Basic Writers: An Overview Basic writers are students who struggle with

writing, but are not learning disabled or English language learners.

One difficulty basic writers have is unfocused and unorganized thinking. Since these students have such high anxiety during the writing process, generating prose is quite challenging.

Also, basic writers are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the academic register, so they struggle to appropriate academic language and connections, making the writing process much more difficult.

Decades of basic writers show their errors have distinct patterns and demonstrate growth.

As basic writers become more familiar with the academic register, errors will be natural and expected from the writing process.

Basic writers do not need to be taught how to think, but rather, they need to be made aware of the skills they already know.

Classroom Implications Requiring multiple drafts before a final draft helps

basic writers during the writing process because they are able to focus their thoughts by writing multiple drafts.

For informal writing, have students identify a body of knowledge in which they are experts. Then, help them transition to a new, unfamiliar academic register.

Classes can no longer be taught like they were twenty years ago.

“We need to confront the social, cultural, and political protocols that surround the technology and defines how it will get used” –Henry Jenkins

The inclusion of technology such as Prezi, Movie Maker and more can foster student creativity

Helps to engage students Provides students with more choices

Using both spoken words and visual digital displays helps students to focus and improve new writing methods.

Blugold Seminar Research Project:Effective First Year College Writing ExperienceBlugold Seminar Research Project:Effective First Year College Writing Experience

ELL Students Use written and oral directions to maximize

students’ understanding Pertaining to grammar errors, only focus on

one or two types of error that most impede reading. Errors are a sign of growth and an indication of development.

Use error charting or identify major error categories (verb tenses, spelling) to help students learn to identify and fix their own mistakes instead of simply correcting them.

Most students will develop some form of interlanguage, a cause of variability (errors and mistakes) which can be due to three contexts: linguistic: language elements of variables.

Some aspects of linguistics will be harder to master, such as subject-verb agreement.

situational: speech styles, social factors and stylistic factors.

psycholinguistic: cognitive processing constraints imposed by the task being undertaken.

The Center for Writing Excellence

We helped design a support system for basic writers in the program.

Through our research and experience, we developed a system in which small tutoring groups meet weekly with Writing Center Writing Assistants trained about Blugold Seminar.

We thank the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs for supporting this research, and Learning & Technology Services for printing this poster.