Teaching Summative Writing within an Introductory Sociology Course: Do Paragraph Frames Improve Students’ Writing Skills?

Pamela J B Brown ,Theodosia A Lovette ,Carol Ann Ham ,Colleen E Bennett

doi:10.7176/jep/10-29-09

Abstract

This article describes the use of a summary writing assignment within an intro sociology course for application of sociological knowledge to current events. Summative writing is paramount to moving through the college curriculum, yet students struggle to be able to begin summary writing exercises, often procrastinating until the last moment, and thus are unsuccessful. Scripts or summary frames are also helpful in the transition to academic language acquisition skill-building, noting scripts, even for speech, provide scaffolding. Thus low states summary writings such as in introductory sociology courses are allowing students to build upon their learned skill as they move through into their upper level discipline focused courses. The skill is transferable to all disciplines and is not relegated to discipline specificity. The following article describes a Time 1/Time 2 assessment of the use of summary frames, with Time 1 using non-prompted writing within the assignment, and Time 2 using prompted writing within the assignments. Additionally, an assessment of the Readability Flesch-Kincaid is considered. Keywords: Writing Prompts, Summative Writing, Introduction courses, Sociology DOI : 10.7176/JEP/10-29-09 Publication date :October 31 st 2019

Highlights

Recent articles lament the writing skills of college students (Migliaccio & Carrigan, 2017; Relies & Tierney, 2013, Goode, 2010; Lillis & Turner, 2011), and in all honesty this has been on ongoing lamentation for many years (Cadwallander & Scarboro, 1982)
After speaking with students, the author found that one phrase repeated often, “How do I start the sentence?” the first author began searching for ways to introduce the summary writing skills within an introductory sociology course including the addition of prompts for which the student can “start” the sentence
This empirical study found that using paragraph frames did not significantly improve students’ writing skilling www.iiste.org within the introductory sociology courses analyzed

Summary

Introduction

Recent articles lament the writing skills of college students (Migliaccio & Carrigan, 2017; Relies & Tierney, 2013, Goode, 2010; Lillis & Turner, 2011), and in all honesty this has been on ongoing lamentation for many years (Cadwallander & Scarboro, 1982). The implementation of “writing across curriculum” (WAC) movement has brought writing in courses other than English into the realm of conceptualization of learning, which allows the students a transferability of knowledge and skills between their courses (Murphree, 2014). This renewed emphasis on writing skills for communication as well as teaching theoretical application allowed the author to create a project to do both: Sociology in the News. Even with the addition of the phrase, “in your own words” the summary was still consistently being constructed with several cut and paste sentences. After speaking with students, the author found that one phrase repeated often, “How do I start the sentence?” the first author began searching for ways to introduce the summary writing skills within an introductory sociology course including the addition of prompts for which the student can “start” the sentence

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Conclusion