BMC WINS GRANT TO TEST TECHNOLOGY
FOR WRITING INSTRUCTION IN THE SCIENCES

David Ross

Professors of mathematics, lab sciences and some of the social sciences tend to focus on instruction in quantitative skills. But students who major in quantitatively demanding disciplines find that guidance in writing skills is harder to come by, says Associate Professor of Economics David Ross, because professors "feel challenged to attend to student writing without sacrificing the heavy content demands of their courses or adding burdens to already stretched teaching loads." Ross thinks that new technologies can make it easier for faculty members to help students develop the writing skills that are critical to success at advanced levels in every academic discipline. With help from Senior Instructional Technologist Laura Blankenship, Writing Center Director Gail Hemmeter and a $13,850 grant from the Center for Educational Technology, Ross will test that hypothesis next summer.

The team's ultimate goal is to develop a workshop that will train faculty members at liberal-arts colleges throughout the Northeast to use new technologies to teach writing to students in quantitatively demanding disciplines. This summer's undertaking is essentially a research-and-design project. Ross, Blankenship and Hemmeter will recruit nine to 12 faculty collaborators and four to six student collaborators from Bryn Mawr, Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges; each collaborator will receive a modest stipend. By testing and commenting on several different products, the collaborators will help the project organizers select the most useful tools and design the curriculum for the workshop.

"Their role falls somewhere between researchers and focus group," Ross says of the collaborators. The group will test comment features in Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat, as well as tablet PCs and Web-based peer/faculty response software.

"We'll give some science faculty the chance to test various tools with real student papers," says Blankenship, "and have the students as well as the faculty evaluate the helpfulness and effectiveness of these technologies. We also hope to have a presentation by a nationally known expert on the use of technology to teach composition."

But the project aims for more than just technology training, says Blankenship. "We can present a lot of research showing that focused, specific comments from teachers make better student writers. We'll include discussion of pedagogical strategies as well as instruction in technology that streamlines the implementation of those strategies."

"Writing instruction is always going to be time-intensive," Hemmeter acknowledges. "It's not likely that Bryn Mawr will use the sort of fully computerized writing labs that some larger institutions employ, because one-on-one interaction between faculty and students is the way we teach here. But that doesn't mean that there's no place for technology in writing instruction at Bryn Mawr.

"One of the things we can do to encourage faculty members in quantitative fields to intervene in student writing is to offer some attractive options," Hemmeter adds.

"A lot of the science faculty like technology and enjoy using it," Blankenship notes. "They may find technological solutions more appealing than hauling home a stack of papers and marking them up by hand."

Ross says that his own frustration with the difficulty of teaching students how to write as economists inspired him to undertake the project.

"A lot of students who major in quantitatively demanding disciplines essentially stop getting instruction in writing after they've completed first-year composition courses and divisional requirements," he says, "but the need doesn't end there.

"Students need to learn how to write about numbers and statistics; they need to learn the conventions of their own disciplines," he explains. "Often the first sustained writing project a student undertakes in a quantitative discipline is the senior thesis. There are many technologies that can make it easier for us to give students guidance in disciplinary writing all along the way — we just need to think about the most effective ways to use them."

The Center for Educational Technology, which will fund the project, is located at Middlebury College. It serves 37 liberal-arts colleges that belong to the Middle Atlantic and New England (MANE) branch of the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education. The project planners hope to offer the workshop to interested faculty from all MANE colleges by summer 2006.

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