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1.
Students in tertiary education are often faced with the prospect of writing an essay on a topic they know nothing about in advance. In distance learning institutions, essays are a common method of assessment in the UK, and specified course texts remain the main sources of information the students have. How do students use a source text to construct an essay? The present paper presents a methodology for mapping the source text on to the finished student essay. The underlying assumption is that students are using a form of imitative problem solving when faced with the complex task of writing an essay. Twenty-two essays written by Open University students in the UK, based on three different questions, were analysed on the basis of the order in which novel concepts were introduced and the extent to which this order mirrored that of the source textbook. Correlations were then carried out between the structure of the essay, the structure of the source text and the eventual grade awarded. The average correlation for all three essays and source texts was 0.8, with some individual essays having a correlation of 0.98, demonstrating that the students were closely imitating the argument structure of the source text.  相似文献   

2.
Previous research has documented the role of readers’ existing topic knowledge in supporting students’ comprehension of text; yet, we know less about how to build students’ knowledge in order to support comprehension and vocabulary learning. In the current study, we test the hypothesis that knowledge can be built and leveraged simultaneously in the interest of students’ literacy development through the use of conceptually coherent text sets. Fourth grade students (N = 59) were randomly assigned to read either a set of six informational texts that cohered around a set of concepts related to the topic birds (CC texts) or a set of texts that addressed a range of topics (NCC group texts). After reading, we assessed students’: (1) knowledge of the concepts in the conceptually coherent text set, (2) knowledge of target concept-related words that appeared in their respective text sets, (3) knowledge of general academic words that appeared in both texts sets, (4) comprehension of a novel text on a related topic, and (5) interest in the topic of the conceptually coherent texts. Results revealed that students who read the conceptually coherent texts demonstrated more knowledge of the concepts in their texts, more knowledge of the target words in their texts, and had better recall of the novel text compared to students who read unrelated texts. Findings suggest that there is potential for knowledge and vocabulary to be built during English language arts through a focus on conceptual coherence in the design of reading experiences for students.  相似文献   

3.
This paper reports on two inter-related studies that examined the use of non-traditional writing strategies within secondary school science classrooms. The first study involved Year 10 students who incorporated one letter writing experience into the learning sequence when studying genetics. The second study was with Year 9 students who used both a non-traditional laboratory writing heuristic and letter writing as part of the learning sequence when studying a topic on light. The same teacher was involved in both case studies. A higher-level analogy question was added to the teacher-prepared tests for each study to examine if students who participated in writing-to-learn activities were able to perform significantly better as a group than a group of students who completed traditional teacher directed laboratory activities and note-taking. Results indicate that for the first study there was not a significant difference using t-test analysis, while for the second study involving two writing treatments there was a statistically significant difference using t-test analysis. There was no statistically significant difference in responses between treatment and control groups when answering low level recall questions for either case study. Student interviews indicated awareness by students of the metacognitive value gained by using the non-traditional writing types.  相似文献   

4.
This intervention study aimed at helping undergraduate students of psychology learn to use the discursive resources useful to make academic voice visible in their texts and to improve their writing practices. The intervention involved tutorial meetings and collaborative revisions in two different learning environments, on-line and face-to face. The final text quality, the students’ knowledge and the amount and the quality of revisions were assessed in both conditions. Results show that the quality of the texts improved for both intervention groups in contrast with for control group, and better texts were related with higher rates of revision and more students’ satisfaction with the intervention.  相似文献   

5.
Abstract

The self-regulated strategy development approach to instruction was used to help 3 middle school students who had learning problems, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and specific language impairment, learn a strategy for planning and writing expository essays. The composition strategy helped students to consider their topic in advance and to use text structure knowledge to develop 5-paragraph essays. Regular education teachers provided instruction to the target students in inclusive classrooms; special education teachers facilitated the writing program. A multiple-probe design across students (R. D. Horner & D. M. Baer, 1978) was used to assess the effects of the strategy. Instruction had a positive effect on the students' approach to writing and overall writing performance. Four weeks following instruction, students' papers remained improved and were still longer and more complete.  相似文献   

6.
In this study, the researcher aimed to understand how students learned the targeted knowledge with an interactive response system (IRS) tool, and whether learners in two different learning modes: individual and group use of IRS, differed in their learning performance and knowledge retention after the IRS activity. These two kinds of IRS interaction were integrated into the course which included multiple choice questions for testing memorable knowledge and open-ended questions for enhancing organization and critical thinking ability via a methodology that involved 120 college students and included the analysis of tests, survey questionnaires and a course learning diary. Overall, the results were consistent with the consensus that students perceive the IRS as a positive addition to their classes, as its use increased course participation, fostered interaction, and promoted the general enjoyment of the class. The results revealed that the immediate learning performance of the learners who participated in the activity through group use of the IRS was better than that of the learners with individual IRS accounts; however, the individual IRS users seemed to have better learning retention of the learning contents, and showed significant improvement on the delayed tests. Furthermore, the study also confirmed that the IRS with collaborative work could promote the students’ academic and social-emotional performance because the collaborative learning allowed them to learn from peers’ opinions and to make judgments and co-examine the learning concepts again while finding the correct answer. This paper contributes data and analysis that highlight the pedagogical benefits of the implementation of an IRS, and supports the value of using the IRS for college education.  相似文献   

7.
The implementation of interactive courseware within a task-based learning (TBL) approach was conducted for English Writing for Business to Chinese students in an applied foreign languages department housed in a university of technology. The development of the interactive courseware is based on Mayer’s multimedia learning theory, which allows learners to construct verbal and visual cognitive representations and integrate them; its language learning focus is keyed to Chapelle’s suggested criteria for development of multimedia CALL (computer assisted language learning). According to the curriculum, students had to accomplish three tasks rooted in the real world workplace: inquiry, negotiation, and complaint. Evaluation of the interactive ESP courseware into TBL instruction was based upon data from students’ pre- and post-writing performance measured by three different types of online computational assessments. In addition, a questionnaire survey about learning satisfaction was administered. The results indicate that students had significantly better post-writing performance and showed greater satisfaction after self-studying with the courseware-implemented instruction, which effectively integrated content knowledge, integrative English skills and writing practices embedded in the courseware. This instruction could be a potentially useful for teaching business writing by providing both content knowledge and its related integrative language practice.  相似文献   

8.
Jerry   《Assessing Writing》2009,14(3):178-193
Large-scale writing programs can add value to the traditional timed writing assessment by using aspects of the essays to assess the effectiveness of institutional goals, programs, and curriculums. The “six learning goals” prompt in this study represents an attempt to provide an accurate writing assessment that moves beyond scores. This paper focuses on student challenges to the prompt and testing situation to reveal that many students successfully challenge the task as a deliberate strategy, while less savvy test-takers clearly resist in response to anger, confusion or frustration. While only a small minority of test-takers openly protest the prompt or testing situation, the paper suggests that all students could be better prepared to reflect upon their university experience in timed essays through more coaching and experience with reflective impromptu questions. This finding offers both encouragement and caution for writing programs seeking a single test that can generate both placement scores and valuable feedback.  相似文献   

9.
Topic interest and learning from texts have been found to be positively associated with each other. However, the reason for this positive association is not well understood. The purpose of this study is to examine a cognitive process, inference generation, that could explain the positive association between interest and learning from texts. In Study 1, sixty undergraduate students participated by reading two science texts, which differed in coherence levels, silently. The results replicated previous findings that topic interest is positively associated with recall and accurate answers to comprehension questions for both texts. In Study 2, sixty-nine undergraduate students participated by reading the same two science texts while thinking aloud. The results indicated that topic interest was positively associated with inference generation while reading for the more coherently-written text. Subsequent analyses indicated inference generation partly explained the positive association between topic interest and accurate answers to comprehension questions for the more coherently-written text. The findings from Study 2 were independent of the effects of reading comprehension skill. Theoretical implications of the findings, in regard to standards of coherence and depth of processing while reading, are discussed.  相似文献   

10.
The use of integrated writing tasks instead of traditional impromptu writing-only tasks is gaining ground in the teaching and assessment of EFL/ESL writing. Source text as the distinct feature of the integrated writing and the concern to improve its quality for the enhanced students' engagement has been a fertile line of inquiry. In this regard, the present study used a body of 67 Iranian intermediate EFL learners in three modalities: emotionalized reading-to-write (ERW) group which received emotionally-loaded source texts along with the emotional activities based on Goleman's Emotional Intelligence framework, reading-to-write (RW) group which developed their essays based on the texts with no focus on their emotional content and a writing-only (WO) group as the control group which followed the traditional writing procedure. The findings showed that ERW group outperformed RW group on the integrated writing tasks. In addition, ERW group performed better than the RW and WO on the overall independent writing task. Furthermore, the emotional intelligence of the students in the ERW group improved more than that of the RW and WO groups in the study. The study discusses that the emotional content of the source text followed by the emotionalized activities would significantly enhance the learners’ engagement with the source text in the reading-to-write tasks and consequently improve their writing. The implications and suggestions for further research are next discussed.  相似文献   

11.
There has been increasing recognition for the need to reform doctoral training practices to foster students’ personal epistemology. This study describes the design and evaluation of a learning experience designed to help students understand the scholarly publication process. Firstly, this study discusses the design of the learning experience, describing the collaborative process of writing an interdisciplinary publication using both online and face-to-face learning. Secondly, this study evaluates the effectiveness of the learning experience by examining students’ reflections. We show that participation in the learning experience helped students to develop their academic writing proficiency, collaboration and teamwork, intercultural competence, and ability to engage in reflective practice. Importantly, we show that each student also created more individualised knowledge, gaining insight into how they and others think. This study, therefore, demonstrates that personal epistemology can be fostered through collaboration in a doctoral writing group context.  相似文献   

12.
Research on expert performance suggests that deliberate practice provides optimal opportunities for expertise development. This study examined whether the provision of computer‐based scaffolding (CBS) guiding deliberate practice facilitates students' development of writing expertise. A CBS environment escribo was designed to externally support expert writing activities, generate feedback and offer opportunities to practise corrected performance in academic writing. There were two testing times. First, the effects of practising writing with escribo were compared with the effects of a practice‐only situation without support. Second, a post‐test comprised composing an essay discussing an academic position without scaffolding. Results revealed that the escribo group at both testing times wrote essays of better comprehensibility than students in the practice‐only group. Furthermore, at both testing times the escribo group expended significantly more time on prewriting. These findings suggest that CBS guiding deliberate practice may be a promising means to facilitate the development of writing expertise.  相似文献   

13.
The present work describes an experience of educational innovation in a university context. Its aim was to determine the relationship between students’ frequency of use of online self-assessment with feedback and their final performance on the course, taking into account both learners’ motivation and perceived usefulness of these resources for their learning process. Furthermore, we studied the relationship between metacognitive variables and academic performance and/or execution of activities aimed at learning the course content. To this end we created self-assessment material with the Hot Potatoes educational program and assessed the degree to which students took advantage of the tool, their satisfaction with it and their perceived knowledge, using ad hoc questionnaires. The results indicate better academic performance in those students that use interactive self-assessment. It should be pointed out that even students with low motivation levels made use of this teaching tool. Finally, a relationship was found between metacognitive variables and students’ effort and performance. We discuss the need to include self-assessment in the curriculum, with a view to improving students’ metacognitive knowledge.  相似文献   

14.
15.
《教育实用测度》2013,26(2):139-157
To determine the effects on test performance and test validity of releasing essay topics before a writing examination, researchers asked 300 prospective graduate students to write 2 essays, 1 on a previously unseen topic and 1 on a topic that was made available about 2 weeks before the test. Although for each of the 4 essay topics studied, performance was slightly better when a topic had been disclosed, overall analyses did not reveal any statistically significant effect of disclosure on test performance. Consequently, there was no detectable effect of disclosure on the relation of test performance to several independent indicators of writing skill. Limitations of the study are discussed in terms of its generalizability to a high-stakes testing situation and the extent to which it addressed both the positive and the negative effects of disclosure.  相似文献   

16.
17.
The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of two peer assessment methods on university students' academic writing performance and their satisfaction with peer assessment. This study also examined the validity and reliability of student generated assessment scores. Two hundred and thirty-two predominantly undergraduate students were selected by convenience sampling during the fall semester of 2007. The results indicate that students in the experimental group demonstrated greater improvement in their writing than those in the comparison group, and the findings reveal that students in the experimental group exhibited higher levels of satisfaction with the peer assessment method both in peer assessment structure and peer feedback than those in the comparison group. Additionally, the findings indicate that the validity and reliability of student generated rating scores were extremely high. Using Wiki interactive software and providing an online collaborative learning environment to facilitate peer assessment added value to peer assessment.  相似文献   

18.
This study offers an innovative and sustainable instructional model for an introductory undergraduate course. The model was gradually implemented during 3 yr in a research university in a large-lecture biology course that enrolled biology majors and nonmajors. It gives priority to sources not used enough to enhance active learning in higher education: technology and the students themselves. Most of the lectures were replaced with continuous individual learning and 1-mo group learning of one topic, both supported by an interactive online tutorial. Assessment included open-ended complex questions requiring higher-order thinking skills that were added to the traditional multiple-choice (MC) exam. Analysis of students’ outcomes indicates no significant difference among the three intervention versions in the MC questions of the exam, while students who took part in active-learning groups at the advanced version of the model had significantly higher scores in the more demanding open-ended questions compared with their counterparts. We believe that social-constructivist learning of one topic during 1 mo has significantly contributed to student deep learning across topics. It developed a biological discourse, which is more typical to advanced stages of learning biology, and changed the image of instructors from “knowledge transmitters” to “role model scientists.”  相似文献   

19.
Current concerns about academic plagiarism in student writing assume qualitative and quantitative differences in the writing of students for whom English is a first language (EL1) and English is a second language (EL2), but lack precision in measuring those differences. I examined the citation practices of EL1 and EL2 students in a timed writing proficiency assessment essay by applying Web-Based Interactive ESL Text Evaluation System (WIETES) software to identify borrowed texts by classifying these references in 16 bounding and documenting categories on a Reading Reference Grid. Results showed few differences overall between EL1 and EL2 referencing practices, as all students shared three common weaknesses in citation practice: vague references, patchwriting and confusion of quotes and paraphrases. Moreover, all students seemed to go through four stages in their development of coherent citation practices, although no EL2 students functioned at the highest level of citation practice. Interviews with the students about their referencing practices indicated that both groups claimed ownership of ideas from the source materials which they expressed in their own words, and they cited correctly more often when they had prior knowledge of the topic of the reading. I conclude with a call to administrators of writing assessments to include judgements of bounding and documenting practices in analytic rating scales.  相似文献   

20.
The primary objective was to investigate the effect of an important motivational variable — interest ∶ on sixth-grade children’s performance on a writing task. Because our previous research showed that prior knowledge has an inordinate effect on writing, we augmented the children’s knowledge of the topics they were to write about. Students studied one of four texts (two high-interest/moderate-knowledge and two low-interest/high-knowledge) and then were assigned to either a tutorial condition, in which they studied and wrote about the same topic, or a control condition, in which they studied one topic and wrote about a companion topic at the same interest and knowledge level. Our general expectation, that children writing with tutorial support on high-interest topics would do better than all other groups because of the motivational effect, was not supported. The results unexpectedly showed that low-interest topics supported by tutorials resulted in longer productions. In addition high interest topics facilitated only better quality ideas, but not qualitatively better writing. These results indicate that the motivational power of generally interesting topics in writing is confounded with the role of prior knowledge. It is further suggested that attentional factors may explain why topic interest has a limited effect on children’s writing performance.  相似文献   

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