Improving Student Writing Skills

Posted by Tammy Andrew Jul 16, 2008

A few years ago my district offered a series of workshops about writing across the curriculum, specifically the Collins Writing Program. Through these I realized that including more short writing assignments in my technology class might improve some of the challenges I faced with teaching some of the competencies. I have now tried a variety of assignments and found an overall increase in comprehension.

What I didn’t expect was the resistance I would face by the students. Brainstorming is fine. Assignments requiring one or more sentences frequently are choppy or provided as bulleted lists. Research papers range from beautiful to disaster, with over half the class in the disaster category. From speaking to several students, I find that they do not view classes outside of English (and some social studies courses) to be places to practice writing well.

And it is not limited to my school. This summer I decided to try something new. I am requiring my students, who come from a variety of schools worldwide, to provide details and accurate descriptions for programming assignments. Out of six students in my advanced class and nine in my introductory class I had four advanced students and three introductory who provided good detail in the first assignment. That changed to six and six respectively by the fourth assignment. By the end of this week, two and half weeks into the session, I hope to see all students providing good to excellent detail in their writing.

I am taking this experience back to my home classroom this fall. Hopefully, if I push a little harder, I can get my students to hone their writing skills while learning new technology concepts. It may only be details that I emphasize for now, but other writing skills may follow if they realize that it does matter.