Results
Over the course of the collaborative writing project I have collected data using a triangulation of methods.
Over the course of the collaborative writing project I have collected data using a triangulation of methods.
Student Feedback
When doing the needs assessment, I gave students a feedback survey asking how they felt about writing in general, as well as, what aspects of what we as teachers were asking them to do, were challenging or easier for them.
This time around however I asked them to use their notebooks to write down and answer a slightly different survey which focused on how they felt about writing having used the collaborative process. I again asked them what was challenging and /or easier, before asking them how they felt about working in groups like this and the collaborative writing process as a whole. I finished the survey off with another Likert scale question that had the students identify the effectiveness they thought the collaborative project had on their work if any.
With regard to their perceptions of the writing process in general, there was very little change. The majority of students seemed to still perceive the writing process as 'comfortable'. The notable difference was that I had zero students claim they were entirely uncomfortable with the writing process despite my student sample size have been lowered from 29 to 26 with the two students who initially wrote being absent at the time of the survey. It is pure speculation but I wonder if they were so uncomfortable that they were skipping classes given that they both were absent on key days of this collaborative group project. Another interesting change happened with one of my most skilled writers. Initially his survey responses had culminated with a message that indicated that while he was comfortable with content and writing, he didn't like writing and found no benefit to group work. His response made sense to me since he is usually one of the students, within a small group in my class, who gets the content quickly and can push further into the deeper more critical thinking aspects of our topics. His response after the project was that he still felt the same about all of the other aspects but that he found the collaborative process to be 'effective' because "we got to really go over the information and share the work so we had more to put in the paper".
My needs assessment student survey showed the following:
Easiest:
1. Understanding content
2. Writing an introduction and conclusion
3. Getting started
Hardest:
1. Writing a thesis
2. Making meaning of what they know and transferring that meaning onto paper
3. Body organization- know what to use and how to support their ideas.
This time around students, in general, listed structure, or body organization, as one of the easier aspects of writing. In fact, it was almost like the script had been flipped with many students listing getting started and writing an introduction as harder while some said that getting their ideas down and structure were easier. There was still a general feeling of challenge when dealing with writing a thesis and understanding content. With respect to the collaborative process itself there was a mixture of responses. Question number four was almost evenly split between 'somewhat effective' and 'effective'. In most cases when addressing the writing benefits of the collaborative process, the survey showed that most students enjoyed working with each other because they were able to split up the work to a create a better final essay. On the negative side, almost all of my groups had at least one person absent during the process and a complaint was that the final essay was a group project but because their group members were absent they had to pull double duty to produce an essay, a typical point of contention when dealing with any sort of collaborative work.
When doing the needs assessment, I gave students a feedback survey asking how they felt about writing in general, as well as, what aspects of what we as teachers were asking them to do, were challenging or easier for them.
This time around however I asked them to use their notebooks to write down and answer a slightly different survey which focused on how they felt about writing having used the collaborative process. I again asked them what was challenging and /or easier, before asking them how they felt about working in groups like this and the collaborative writing process as a whole. I finished the survey off with another Likert scale question that had the students identify the effectiveness they thought the collaborative project had on their work if any.
With regard to their perceptions of the writing process in general, there was very little change. The majority of students seemed to still perceive the writing process as 'comfortable'. The notable difference was that I had zero students claim they were entirely uncomfortable with the writing process despite my student sample size have been lowered from 29 to 26 with the two students who initially wrote being absent at the time of the survey. It is pure speculation but I wonder if they were so uncomfortable that they were skipping classes given that they both were absent on key days of this collaborative group project. Another interesting change happened with one of my most skilled writers. Initially his survey responses had culminated with a message that indicated that while he was comfortable with content and writing, he didn't like writing and found no benefit to group work. His response made sense to me since he is usually one of the students, within a small group in my class, who gets the content quickly and can push further into the deeper more critical thinking aspects of our topics. His response after the project was that he still felt the same about all of the other aspects but that he found the collaborative process to be 'effective' because "we got to really go over the information and share the work so we had more to put in the paper".
My needs assessment student survey showed the following:
Easiest:
1. Understanding content
2. Writing an introduction and conclusion
3. Getting started
Hardest:
1. Writing a thesis
2. Making meaning of what they know and transferring that meaning onto paper
3. Body organization- know what to use and how to support their ideas.
This time around students, in general, listed structure, or body organization, as one of the easier aspects of writing. In fact, it was almost like the script had been flipped with many students listing getting started and writing an introduction as harder while some said that getting their ideas down and structure were easier. There was still a general feeling of challenge when dealing with writing a thesis and understanding content. With respect to the collaborative process itself there was a mixture of responses. Question number four was almost evenly split between 'somewhat effective' and 'effective'. In most cases when addressing the writing benefits of the collaborative process, the survey showed that most students enjoyed working with each other because they were able to split up the work to a create a better final essay. On the negative side, almost all of my groups had at least one person absent during the process and a complaint was that the final essay was a group project but because their group members were absent they had to pull double duty to produce an essay, a typical point of contention when dealing with any sort of collaborative work.
Group Work:
During my needs assessment I had asked each of the students to write an essay paper so that I could determine a base line for what their writing looked like. I used the rubric at the left for each paper and then created a graph that gave me an overall picture of what student work looked like with regard to structure, critical analysis, content knowledge, mechanics, and evidence of support.
For the collaborative project I had eight papers to grade and used the same rubric to determine if there had been any changes in the four areas.
The graph to the immediate right shows the results of the eight papers grade with regard to the rubric used. Below that is a graph of the base line grades of the individual student grades done in the needs assessment using that same rubric.
I was very pleasantly surprised by some of the differences that the collaborative project had brought about. As the graph to the right demonstrates, across the board each of the four areas shifted towards the left, or better. Both critical analysis and mechanics showed a moderate shift towards higher scores. With evidence and support, the majority of the class, who were previously at a three, shifted one higher to the score of four. With structure, the majority of the papers were in the five and four range. In all aspects, save mechanics, none of the papers received a score of one. Interestingly, the number of scores at five, for mechanics and content knowledge, lowered from two to one. That is significant since the previous graph was based on 29 papers and the new graph on eight. This would indicate that the actual number of people who had gotten a five had increased by two.
All in all the students appeared to have done better with respect to the rubric on the collaborative essay than they did on the base line essay, but not by much. Only four students of the 29 received a score of one and this was for mechanics. The most affected areas for the positive occurred in structure, evidence and support.
It is important to note, however, that while the conventions of grading and content are similar, the collaborative process was a concerted effort to cover all aspects of the content, DBQ, structure, direct use of primary sources and the essay writing. The previous paper, while having prepared the students in terms of the same things, was done as a culminating assessment without my help, the help of their peers or guidance during writing process.
Still, all that being said, I was initially concerned that the increase in scores may have been led by the stronger students in each group putting in more time towards the end result. Were my students really all working together to create a good project? My observations offered some further insight as to some of the positives and negatives of my first implementation.