Moving Forward: Teaching in Uncertain Times

Community Blog on online, hybrid, and F2F teaching during the pandemic

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Overcoming Students’ Distaste for Writing through Class Blogs

By Matt Nusnbaum, Ph.D.
Department of Biology

Student versus expert writing and approaches to writing

It is not news that students entering into college are not expert writers; in fact, we wouldn’t expect them to be. When many students leave high school, they have learned the mechanics of writing, but that is a far cry from the kind of practice and confidence that they need to be considered expert. But, getting students to move away from student-style writing and to expert-style writing is a perennial challenge. One thing is for certain, they can’t get there without practice.

Preparing students to succeed in the workplace requires us to help close the gaps between student writing and professional writing. To do that, students need to have training and opportunities to engage in the writing process. But the fact of the matter is that many of our students (especially those outside of the humanities) fear writing, dislike writing, or describe themselves as “bad writers”. The assignment of a single term paper or even a report that is scaffolded through drafts still intimidates many students based on their perception of what academic writing looks like and their lack of comfort with the process.

The Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program describes three general approaches to assigned writing whose goals vary a bit. These are “Writing to Learn”, “Writing to Engage” and “Writing in the Disciplines”. As you can tell by their titles, the focus of the writing itself and the purpose of the writing assignment will vary depending on the application. To be honest, my interpretation is that an assignment can actually use more than one of these approaches. A blog assignment like I describe here can, theoretically, be applied to all three writing structures. If our goal is to promote low-stakes opportunities to engage in writing and encourage the development of critical thinking skills, the key is to carefully design the writing prompts and the frequency of the assignment to that end. Offering regular and lower stakes writing assignments throughout a course is one potential way to lower student stress while simultaneously promoting engagement.

Writing in STEM

I started using the blog assignment in one of my classes not long after I took the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) workshop at GSU. If you haven’t taken that workshop and you are interested in incorporating writing into your courses, I highly recommend it! It is a nice weekend-long program, and you get to engage with colleagues from across the university. The primary emphasis is on low-stakes and manageable incorporation of content-aligned writing activities. During the two-day workshop, I was able to reevaluate how I thought about the role of writing in the process of learning.

So many of our STEM students fit the description I gave above of disliking writing at least in part because they consider themselves bad writers and, hence, avoiding it. Thus, the assignment of a term paper in a course may cause anxiety. On the other hand, presenting writing as a career-development skill and introducing it as a process rather than a product, an instructor has an opportunity to change perceptions about writing from within the confines of a discipline-specific course. With these lower-stakes assignments and a little direct instruction, a course can teach writing skills including research, outlining, editing/proof-reading, critical analysis, etc.

Many students dislike the process of writing, but I find that they nearly universally dislike the peer-review process even more. The most common complaint I hear is that their classmates are too nice and don’t provide enough actionable criticism. Below I will share a blog writing assignment that I have been using, and refining, in one of my courses for a few years. As an instructor, the blogging assignment allows you to give your students regular and meaningful feedback on their writing. But, it also allows student to easily share their work with each other and request feedback. I have recently begun implementing an assigned peer-critique of the first blog post, after it has already been submitted for grading. In this way, students get to experience the entire writing process, observe their colleagues’ approaches, and grow over the course of the semester.

Animal Biology Blogging

Biology is a large department (we have over 2,000 majors!) in which many of our students aspire to careers in medical fields or research. Animal Biology is a course that is required for all of our undergraduate Biology majors; I teach a section or two of this course almost every semester. It is no secret among students that many of them are taking the course because it is required and not necessarily because of an affinity for the material. Over the years I have reimagined the structure of Animal Biology to serve dual purposes: A) As a content-heavy course that requires significant study skills to digest and learn complex terminology and B) As a skill development course to provide students opportunities to grow toward their career goals. In this course, students complete group activities, read and summarize primary literature, work through different study techniques, and write about the subject matter. The blog assignment serves as an opportunity to tie all of these skills together. It also forces students to engage in the process of writing, but also incorporate aspects of digital technology and creativity along the way.

Each student is assigned a broad taxonomic category from within Kingdom Animalia and tasked with identifying a single species to focus their work. For example, a student may be assigned Crustacea (crabs, lobsters, shrimp, etc.), and be asked to identify, for example, the Peacock Mantis Shrimp, Odontodactylus scyllarus. Over the course of the semester, they research their species and craft posts about their species’ anatomy and physiology, habitat, and evolution, incorporating links, images and videos along the way. Students are also assigned the task of reviewing classmates’ blog posts and providing feedback according to a clear and structured analysis form. I ask them to identify key components of their classmate’s post, such as the strongest sentence, and give specific, actionable advice about how to improve areas of weakness. That experience lets each student see how their colleagues approached the same task while also allowing them to serve as peer writing mentors. Since I provide a structure to the review, the process itself is less daunting and the product is, hopefully, more constructive. This project culminates with the identification of a primary literature paper about their species, which the students summarize and interpret. To me, the most important part of this exercise is that students are instructed to write their blogs for a general audience, meaning they have to translate the dense article into language and form that a non-expert could understand. This new blog work product is now the student’s own record of their semester-long project and can be shared publicly or incorporated into a digital portfolio in a way that might not always make sense for an essay or term paper.

Setting up a blog is not as complicated as it might sound, but some platforms may have a learning curve. Fortunately, all Georgia State students automatically have a blog that is created for them. All they have to do is request it be activated at sites.gsu.edu. This system is supported by Edublogs and offers an incredibly user-friendly introduction to blogging software. It also happens to be powered by WordPress, which is a ubiquitous platform that powers about 1/3 of the internet. Having our students learn how to use this tool provides them with an instantly marketable skill. Edublogs has a ton of support materials to help students learn how to manage their blog, personalize its appearance, and create posts and pages. The structure allows students to each have their own personal blogs while linking to your class blog, so that you can view, and review, each assignment. An alternative approach I have seen is to have your students post to a shared class blog and rotate the assignment through the class. Here is an article from InsideHigherEd with some more advice about different approaches to using blogs to build writing into your course.

Incorporating this blog assignment into Animal Biology did take some work, but it is one of the most rewarding changes I’ve made in my teaching. If you’re interested in learning more about this project, or academic blogging, feel free to reach out to me at mnusnbaum1@gsu.edu or just check out our class blog and some of my students’ work from this semester!

lcarruth • February 16, 2021


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Comments

  1. Stephanie Gutzler February 17, 2021 - 5:19 pm

    Matt,
    Thank you for this insightful blog and the additional resources you provide here. I look forward to reading more about how blogs are effectively being used in courses, particularly in STEM. Your points about developing marketable skills through this project are especially compelling. I would be interested in learning more about the structured method you use to direct students to provide feedback to their peers. As an instructor who utilizes discussion forums as a major component of her courses, this is what I struggle with most. I tell students that their feedback needs to be more significant than, “Great post!” but I have never actually explicitly provided direction on what that means (nor have I devised an objective way of assessing their feedback). This might be an interesting “sequel” for a future blog 😉

    • Matthew Nusnbaum February 19, 2021 - 3:25 pm

      Thanks Stephanie! I actually have a form that I give my students as a part of the peer critical analysis assignment and they fill it in. I’m happy to share it with you directly, but maybe diving into the student feedback process is a good subject for the future. Briefly, I ask the students to fill in some concrete information about the post (post title, first sentence, etc.) and then select the strongest sentence and a sentence/phrase that could use improvement. I then leave some space for the reviewer to provide advice to improve the flow and clarity of the overall post.

  2. David February 18, 2021 - 9:42 pm

    Students despise blog posting because they perceive that they needs must expend more effort in producing the disposable writings than is ever perceived to be spent in its reading. Their efforts leaves in them the sour aftertaste of a contrived exercise that they must pretend to have enjoyed and perhaps even learned from.

    An instructor adds the most value to writing exercises in a course when he can demonstrate that his writing exercises are authentic within his discipline. By volume in the academic environment, professional writing mostly means e-mails.

    Perhaps such assignments could be framed as exercises in distilling a given situation into the body of an e-mail (via blog/discussion post) possessed of timeliness, tact, and–most importantly–brevity?

    • Matthew Nusnbaum February 19, 2021 - 3:20 pm

      David, that is an interesting perspective I hadn’t considered; that students might feel the need to feign interest in their posts and are being inauthentic in the process. I do agree that authenticity is important, but in my opinion being able to write for a variety of audiences is an authentic need in most academic fields. In the context of Biology, if we only teach students to write formal research papers, we are leaving out significant and important writing skills. That is why, in the context of the blogging assignment I shared here, I present the project as a career-development and skill-building opportunity in addition to the content development. I do love the idea of writing assignments in the context of e-mail and e-mail etiquette!

      Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

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