Building Supportive Cultures for Student Writing in UK Higher Education

Lisa Clughen

Christine Hardy

Nottingham Trent University

Overview

• Student experiences of literacies prior to university (focusing on the UK)

• Student experiences of academic literacies during the transition to university (focusing on the first year)

• Including and supporting students with their academic literacies whilst in transition to university

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Research Context

Students are offered a lot of support, so why are they

still struggling?

How do our students experience writing? 

I've promised myself that I'm not going to hit the panic button when things go wrong this year so I'd really appreciate some level-headed advice to keep me on track.

I was up till the early hours trying to do this (…) essay and got myself in a right mess (i lost the ability to write so cried for a while) and have overslept.

I am having quite a lot of problems at the minute now that I am in my final year and am suffering from a complete lack of academic confidence.

This is also a bit of an SOS message.

Research Frame: Socio-cultural approaches

‘The most pertinent insights into literacy learning come from acknowledging its sociocultural framing’

(Christie and Misson, 2002, 54)

Two key insights from Sociocultural Perspectives

•Writing is cultural/contextual: it varies over time and place

•Writing is linked to the Self/ Subjectivity-Agency/ Identity/ Being

Data Collection

Students

•724 completed questionnaires from the annual experience and expectations survey from pre-arrival students from 2009-2011

•28 students across all level of study in Art & Design and Arts & Humanities (9 focus groups)

•455 completed questionnaires from all students at NTU 2011

Academic Staff

•136 completed questionnaires from academic staff at NTU 2011

Collected data from both students and academic staff using questionnaires and focus groups:

Research Areas•Experiences of reading and writing prior to attending university

•Expectations of reading and writing at university (students and academic staff)

•Practices of reading and writing at university

•Feelings about reading and writing

•Support for reading and writing (students and academic staff)

•Open section

Writing at School

Image from Ofstead News Issue 9. Available from: http://ofstednews.ofsted.gov.uk/?cmd=audiences.printable&issue=28&audience=schools

National Curriculum: Key Stage 4 - GCSE Grade C (level 5 descriptor):

Pupils’ writing is varied and interesting, conveying meaning clearly in a range of forms for different readers, using a more formal style where appropriate. Vocabulary choices are imaginative and words are used precisely. Sentences, including complex ones, and paragraphs are coherent, clear and well developed. Words with complex regular patterns are usually spelt correctly. A range of punctuation, including commas, apostrophes and inverted commas, is usually used accurately. Handwriting is joined, clear and fluent and, where appropriate, is adapted to a range of tasks.

Student experiences

•Directed reading, not much additional reading

•Information given by tutors in terms of subject and content

•Used internet a lot for research

•Only parts of book read

•More writing than reading, but short pieces (5 or fewer pages)

•Schooled for examinations: limited assessment types

•Teacher support to develop writing, particularly assessing two or more drafts

… you would write something and then … I remember for my coursework in History, I would hand it in, he would mark it and tell me what I needed to improve on, and I would get it back and I could do some more and then hand it in. So I think that was – it was ‘spoonfed’ to you I guess, you got a lot of support. It was the same for English (final year A&H).

Dependency

Outcomes• Prior to attending university students feel prepared to write clearly

and effectively, think critically and analytically, analyse problems and analyse written materials.

“To begin with [I was] not worried about it. I felt from school and college I knew enough about what to do” (second year A&D).

• They expected to receive support in their studies and were confident that they could access this easily. They felt that support to help them to succeed was very important, and they expected to receive prompt feedback on their work.

• Epistemological beliefs about learning: reproductive conceptions, not prepared to work with and contest the authoritative knowledges presented in texts, do not reflect on their beliefs in order to form judgements and demonstrate them through appropriate academic discourse.

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Writing at university

The Student Life 2012. Image available from: http://studentslife101.com/2012/06/28/the-university-gadget-guide-dictaphones/

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Student Expectations of Writing at Uni

All students had expected literacy (reading and writing) at university to be harder than their previous experiences, either at school or college but were unclear about what this meant:

Harder than it was before, as university is the next step and it seems like a bigger thing … [harder] in a more professional way maybe, more challenging as it would be the next step in your education (first year A&D).

I imagined it to be extremely difficult, as my whole perception of university was like the crème de la crème. … I just

thought it would be extremely hard (first year A&H)

Student expectations about writing at university

Other students had been influenced by what they read before attending university:

My expectations were really high when I came to university, how I was expected to write. I almost felt intimidated by what I was reading, which is what I thought I had to write so it was really ‘scary’ as you read something and think about how well they have written it and the quality of what you are saying (final year A&H).

I thought things had to be elaborate and sound as if I knew what I was talking about and the words and the vocabulary had to be more complicated (second year A&H).

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Staff expectations of Writing at Uni

…first year students to reference appropriately (58%), to structure a coherent argument (76%) and to follow the conventions of their discipline for presenting written work (87%). When it came to synthesis and criticality, they expected students to undertake synthesis of others’ work, but the expectations of critical appraisal at this stage were less onerous.

Student experiences of writing at university

• Many students find that their successful strategies for A level are now inappropriate (Lea and Street 1998), so they can increasingly lose confidence once at university (Ahmad and McMahon 2006) as “[they] suddenly see their undergraduate essays marked more harshly than their school essays” (Murray and Kirton 2006, p.9).

• They find difficulty with: referencing (the primary issue), academic jargon and difficulties in structuring academic work, finding academic reading boring and finding it hard to read academic texts.

• One of the difficulties is due to the different types of text they are expected to read at university, their lack of previous knowledge of these text genres and their lack of familiarity with content

Student experiences of writing at university

• Less writing but the quality is different

I don’t find the actual pace or the amount of writing and assignments I have to hand in is as intense as it was at college, but the quality of writing – trying to learn to write in an academic way … we knew that we needed to be more concise – we would have less words to get all our information in, but it is changing the tone of your voice, from your voice to what is acceptable in an essay, that is what I find really difficult and that is not what I was expecting so much (first year A&H).

• Referencing is also a problem:

One part of this ‘academic way’ is referencing and the possibility of plagiarism. “You never had to do that at sixth form, you literally wrote ‘by so and so’ and you did not have to do anything else” (second year A&H)

Student experiences of writing at university

•Disciplinary differences:

[You] take information from many sources; different terminology, different ways of people writing about it. So to put it all together in one coherent piece of writing is difficult (first year A&D).

Referencing is completely different for English and History – I did not understand how it worked. …. Before I came to university, I never had to do the whole referencing thing, and that was a big shock (first year A&H)

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Student experiences of writing at university

•Writing in different genres:

•Students are “expected to possess or to acquire a working knowledge of a variety of written forms and writing conventions” (Ganobcsik-Williams 2004).

•Staff at NTU identified 47 different genres, students 19.

“[I had] no experience of the different kinds of writing required … so it took me a while to grasp what they wanted me to do (first year A&D).

… but, what is a document response? We did not get it defined in seminars or lectures” (A&H year two).

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Differing expectations

‘Every time a student sits down to write for us he or she has to invent the university for the occasion – invent the university, that is, or a branch of it … The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the particular ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community. Or perhaps I should say the various discourses of our community’. (Bartholomae 1985: 134).

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What do the students want

• Useful feedback

I read everything, not just the comments but what has been circled, question marks etc. and sometimes I don’t understand why they are there, what I have done wrong” (A&H year two).

One of the comments I get is ‘you need to write in a scholarly way’ but what is a scholarly way? I don’t understand it – what they want I am not capable of giving (A&H year one).

• Timetabled one to one tutorials with staff

“[you can] speak to your tutor directly and get out of that session exactly what you needed to get” (A&D year one)

• Often felt awkward asking staff for help

“it would take me a long time to get the courage to go, it is a pride thing really” (A&H year two)

What do students want?

Compulsory essay writing in the course (in a seminar setting)

‘to really apply it to what you are doing on your specific course, the specific essay etc. It gives you ideas on how to develop your

points’. (A&H year one)

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What help students want in order of importance

• Compulsory sessions in their programme of study, in a seminar or tutorial setting but not a lecture, as those were for the delivery of content

• Tutor feedback on their work

• More detail about tutor requirements for a piece of work

• University workshops

• Drop-in sessions with someone separate from their programme of study

• On-line or printed support materials

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Concluding Thoughts (1)...

Academic writing support is the responsibility of the university as a whole and should be central to a university’s learning and teaching strategy.

Concluding Thoughts (2)...

Recognise that literacy is a social practice: –broader contexts –individual contexts

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Concluding thoughts (3)

‘We are about to see an escalation in student expectation ramped up to a magnitude that is almost impossible to imagine or comprehend, a magnitude far beyond that which might already have created challenges for us to resolve’.

(Beer, 2011)

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Concluding thoughts (4)...

Writing support tailored to the individual.

There is no one size fits all: writing environments need to be organic to cater for the different needs of these very different beings.

Dialogic writing environments. 

‘Writing in the Disciplines’ book

Editors:Lisa Clughen, Nottingham TrentUniversity, UKChristine Hardy, Nottingham TrentUniversity, UKPublication date: May 2012

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