Writing circles and retreats as tools for enhancing student’s writing: ‘Will there be a writing circle soon? They’ve really helped with my grades’
| Strand | Student attainment |
| Type | Campfire |
| Learning Objective(s) | This session will provide information and reflections on a pilot to support disciplinary writing. |
| This project was developed to increase student academic literacy with a specific focus on including students from a widening participation background (e.g. BME/first generation). The project focused on supporting development of independent control of the writing process; understanding and recognising the features of high quality disciplinary academic writing (Sadler 2010, Scoles 2013, Mitchell, S., & Riddle, M. 2000), and developing practices of expert writers in writing and reviewing text. The project provided three distinct interventions for Level 6 students; creation of exemplars of high scoring student writing with staff commentary, providing writing retreats to generate text (Petrova et al 2009) and writing circles to collaboratively develop editing skills (Roberts et al 2017). We used staff and student project assistants to facilitate sessions to develop and support a culture of peer review as a valuable formative writing activity.The project was evaluated pre- and post-intervention focusing on measures of writing anxiety, self-efficacy and emotional intelligence (Huerta, M., et al 2017). We will also present staff and student experiences of the project and our initial thoughts of the viability of this approach. | |
| References | Huerta, M., Goodson, P., Beigi, M., & Chlup, D. (2017). Graduate students as academic writers: writing anxiety, self-efficacy and emotional intelligence. Higher Education Research & Development, 36(4), 716-729.Mitchell, S., & Riddle, M. (2000). Improving the quality of argument in higher education. Final Report. School of Lifelong Learning and Education: Middlesex University
Petrova, P., & Coughlin, A. (2009). Using structured writing retreats to support novice researchers. International Journal for Researcher Development. Roberts, S. K., Blanch, N., & Gurjar, N. (2017). Exploring Writing Circles as Innovative, Collaborative Writing Structures with Teacher Candidates. Reading Horizons, 56 (2) Sadler, D. R. (2010). Beyond Feedback: Developing student capability in complex appraisal. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 35, 535-550. Scoles, J., Huxham, M. & McArthur, J., (2013) No longer exempt from good practice: using exemplars to close the feedback gap for exams, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 38:6, 631-645, DOI: 10.1080/02602938.2012.674485Scoles, J., Huxham, M. & McArthur, J., (2013) No longer exempt from good practice: using exemplars to close the feedback gap for exams, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 38:6, 631-645, DOI: 10.1080/02602938.2012.674485 |