Julie Reynolds, Duke University, Biology
Interested in helping scientists learn how to write and develop critical thinking skills through their writing.
Four questions she’s struggled with in her classes:
- What are readers’ expectations?
- How can we communicate nuance?
- How do students balance feedback from multiple readers?
- How can we help students develop their voice?
What are readers’ expectations?
- Honors thesis course in biology: multiple readers.
- Students have to write for multiple readers and for the type of reading for the field.
- When taught scientists don’t read from start to finish, student’s didn’t believe it. To help them learn, she had students interview people in their field about how professionals in biology read. They bring back the videos and watch as a class. Look for patterns
- Showed faculty member interview. He starts with images and graphs: said the captions are important. Then wants to read the results and how they got it. Ends with methodology if everything else is relevant. Considers bibliography.
- Learn some of the conventions of the discipline (added bonus!)
This video exercise could be really useful for information literacy. You could have students ask faculty how they find information for their research, what common pitfalls do they see in student research, what is the difference between student research and faculty research, etc.
How can we communicate nuance?
- Pointed out that when typing response, we tend to be more terse then when giving verbal feedback. More words provides more feedback.
- Uses Jing to comment on student writing. Pull up electronic copy of writing, and highlight, insert comment boxes while talking. Uploads to screencast.com for sharing with students.
- Allows just-in-time feedback. More efficient for the teacher/grader.
- Had done something similar with audio-only in the past, but students have preferred the video much more.
- Also uses Jing for peer review. Says to model good peer review, and provide tools to give good peer review. This year had three text peer review and three video. Students said they preferred the video.
- Goal: video to save time, don’t do written and video feedback.
How do students balance feedback from multiple readers?
- Generally choose to focus on comments from the people with the most power.
- Reynolds wanted a way to pull together all comments into one place for students to see them all. Good for faculty, too, to see the other comments.
- Used VoiceThread with a concept map. Allows verbal comments, writing on the image, and text.
- Since there were more than one commenter, second person chose to focus on things first commenter didn’t comment on. Allowed reduced duplication and for both commenters to focus on their areas of expertise.
- Could only get one other faculty person to participate in this pilot, so doesn’t have good assessment, and she may not use this in the future if faculty aren’t comfortable using it.
How can we help students develop their voice?
- Students think that the goal is to write what the faculty want (the audience of one).
- That doesn’t develop the student’s voice, though.
- Reynolds is using a video to try to meet this goal: pick an audience, think about what you want to say to them, construct an argument, give evidence to support argument, counter counter-argumetn, engage the audience. First script was a traditional writing exercise. But in filming it, their voice was more evident.
- (As in my experience) Reynolds finds students spend a lot more time on these projects: public, and more fun.
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