Abstract
This work reports the results of a case study where traditional activities in an engineering/science classroom, such as demonstrations and self-paced activities, were compared with ‘writing across the curriculum” (WAC) activities. One group did writing-to-learn assignments and one group did our seminal construct ‘question-to-learn’ where they designed exam problems for their peers. A model is presented which describes the parameters that influence the exam score outcome. Some of these variables were carefully controlled during the project (labs, textbook, lecturer) and some other parameters were measured (lecture attendance, time-on-task and previous knowledge) in order to minimize data corruption due to confounding variables. The main parameter of interest, the ‘predictor’ of the exam score was the extra-curricular activity. A pre-test and a post-test were also conducted in order to establish the students relative gain. We also tested the hypothesis of using the quality of the students’ WAC outputs as a predictor of academic achievements. Data is analyzed both with parametric and non-parametric methods and results show that there was no significant difference between the groups on exam scores and that the relationship between WAC quality and exam scores is not significant. The main reason for the non-significant results is concluded to be due to low participation rates and too low “dosage”.
Highlights
In the ancient Greece, Platon argued that writing was a threat to intellectual training since it would diminish the need for memorization and foster only a pretense of wisdom [1]
We investigated the possibility of using the quality of the QTL and Writing to learn (WTL) students’ writing assignments as a predictor for Y0 – Y3; the average score on their QTL/WTL assignments was plotted against their performance scores and a linear graph was fitted to the data
Results show that there was no significant correlation between QTL/WTL scores and their academic performance
Summary
In the ancient Greece, Platon argued that writing was a threat to intellectual training since it would diminish the need for memorization and foster only a pretense of wisdom [1]. Today, writing is generally recognized as an important element of any curriculum in higher education and one of the most efficient vehicles for learning. It benefits content learning and higher order thinking skills at the same time [25], it promotes critical thinking [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14], metacognition [1517], helps students develop their general ability to express themselves [18] and converts their thoughts to words [19]. Others emphasize the metacognitive processes that are stimulated by writing; the students are forced to think about a) how they perceive the information, what they understand (and what they don’t understand) [25], and b) how they connect new information to what they already know [19, 26, 27]
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