Write Now News - June 2010

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Embedded writing support at Liverpool Hope
Writing workshops for early career researchers
Assessment, marking and feedback
Write Now Final Self-Evaluation
Using online tutorials for writing development at London Met
An evening with Royce Sadler
Expert lectures in Birmingham and London
Writing Development in Higher Education conference
Forthcoming events

Embedded writing support at Liverpool Hope

For many it goes without saying that university students need to be good writers - in fact, it is argued that writing is crucial to success in HE (Torrance et al., 1999) as it can be an extremely effective transformative learning tool (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987). Good writing skills have been shown to help retention and employability of students (Drew, 1998). However, a question worth asking is whether writing is merely assessed or truly developed in HE?

Following policies of widening participation and in response to a perceived decline in writing standards among students, there has been a move towards generic writing support; a central service providing support to all students across the university regardless of their discipline or level of studies. Often the design of this kind of support is based on a remedial view of what writing support should entail with a strong focus on surface literacy. However, analyses of writing needs amongst students have shown different requirements. Of course, grammar, spelling and punctuation are important, but our students struggle with much bigger issues which often form part of the process of familiarising themselves with the requirements of HE in general and of their subject in particular. That is why writing experts such as Ganobscik-Williams (1996) propose offering writing support from within the disciplines aimed at helping students become “accomplished players in the academy” who are familiar with the codes and conventions of their subject area.

At Liverpool Hope, writing support is targeted largely at individual students through means of a tutorial programme run by the Writing Centre and delivered by trained peer tutors and Centre staff. The tutorials reveal that, whilst surface literacy is a developmental need for some students, understanding how meaning is made within the disciplines is what causes students the greatest difficulties. Consequently, the Centre has long sought to engage in collaboration with departments. The support of CETL writing specialists has enabled the Writing Centre to develop a faculty-based model focussed around the notion of a design consultancy. In this model there is one contact person, a Writing Specialist, for each faculty, and the Writing Specialists actively promote the work of the Centre by liaising with departmental staff and attending faculty meetings. In addition to one-off workshops and individual tutorials, a writing component design service is offered. This initiative has allowed faculty and Writing Centre staff to design writing materials for their students based on the core teaching materials. An example of the design and delivery of an embedded writing component is described below in Figures 1 and 2.


*Figure 1: Example of embedded writing support* Large numbers of students from the Postgraduate Certificate in Education programme came to the Writing Centre for tutorial support. Based on this information, the course leader was approached and the option of designing writing materials specifically for their students was discussed. This offer was taken up and a 14-hour academic reading & writing component was generated which was subsequently delivered by the seminar leaders. The materials were evaluated extensively and both students and seminar leaders provided positive feedback on the support offered. Grades were compared to those of the last cohort for the same assignment and an increase of 5.9% was shown. Furthermore, the course leaders expressed that talks with the Writing Specialist have helped them reflect on the nature of the assignment, which has led to the decision to re-design the task brief.

Figure 2: Project stages

This faculty based approach has been successful in generating embedded writing support that has received extremely positive feedback from both students and faculty. Students have expressed their appreciation of subject specific materials to help them improve their academic reading and writing, whilst staff felt the expertise of the Writing Specialists helped them gain a better understanding of their students’ needs. Having a specific contact person has improved the relationship between writing staff and faculty and has led to a number of projects including an assessment design audit, a formative referencing intervention, Turnitin and unintentional plagiarism workshops for staff and students as well as a research project on epistemological empowerment through academic skills.

Writing workshops for early career researchers

Writing Specialists, Dr Rebecca Westrup and Sarra Saffron Powell, recently supported Professor Lin Norton at Liverpool Hope University in delivering a highly successful two day writing workshop for early career researchers funded by Write Now. The workshop, which was very well attended by eighteen members of teaching staff from a range of disciplines, offered participants the opportunity to discuss issues relating to their individual academic writing, target setting, and reflecting on their writing. The workshop provided a supportive environment in which participants were able to achieve their writing targets during the scheduled writing sessions that were incorporated across the two days.

During Day One, Professor Hartley, Keele University, visited the workshop and imparted useful advice about approaches to writing followed by a question and answer session. On Day Two Professor Norton delivered a presentation which focused on writing for and publishing in journals. All participants received complementary copies of Professor James Hartley’s Academic writing and publishing: a practical guide (2008), and Professor Sarah Moore’s publication, The Handbook of academic writing: a fresh approach (2006).

The Write Now team will continue to run the group to maintain writing momentum. It is anticipated that the group will meet fortnightly and that a range of published experts from within Liverpool Hope University will attend during the workshops to offer advice and guidance to participants. Professor Suzanne Schwartz of Liverpool Hope will be sharing her extensive publication experience in the first run-on session. Professor Norton will be facilitating a second workshop in June 2010 at Liverpool Hope: the workshop will be led by Professor Moore, Dean of Learning and Teaching, from the University of Limmerick.

Assessment, marking and feedback
Liverpool Hope develops new tools to support teaching staff

At Liverpool Hope, there has been a substantial amount of CETL research focussing on developing robust measures for capturing academics’ views on the important issues of assessment, marking and feedback. We have made considerable progress on two inventories; the Assessment Design Inventory and the Assessment Marking and Feedback Inventory.

Once the research on using these tools has been published, the Hope research team, led by Professor Lin Norton and including Lee Shannon, Bill Norton and Dr Kamel Mansi, will make the final versions freely available on the Write Now website to assist:

Researchers who wish to carry out their own research in assessment design
Staff developers/PGCLTHE tutors who wish to use the inventories within their programmes as a stimulus for discussion and debate around the often problematic areas of assessment and feedback.

The Assessment Design Inventory (ADI) is almost finalised and there are plans to submit a paper reporting on this research over the summer months. After much iteration, piloting and full scale research involving over 600 lecturers from over 60 universities in the UK, the ADI has been progressively refined from 68 to 40 items. The current version includes 15 items which represent two main factors: desirable practice (meaning pedagogically sound assessment design practice) and constraints (meaning barriers that may hinder lecturers from implementing pedagogically sound assessment design practice).

Work on the Assessment, Marking and Feedback Inventory (AMFI) is progressing well under the direction of Dr Kamel Mansi, working with Professor Norton and Bill Norton. The design of this inventory is based on various sources including a comprehensive literature review, previous survey projects and in-depth interviews conducted by the Hope Write Now research team. The main purpose of designing this AMFI questionnaire is to elicit reliable and valid information about lecturers’ practices and to understand their views about challenges they face.

The current version of the AMFI consists of five sections including questions about:

Demographic information such as age, gender, years of experience and teaching qualifications
55 different methods of assessment known in the literature, such as exams, essays, dissertations, posters, and book reviews
Lecturers’ attitudes towards assessment
Critical statements about lecturers’ practices of and attitudes towards marking, including items about the role of external examiners, grading systems, professional training in marking and accuracy of marking (this is the core section of the questionnaire)
Practices and attitudes of lecturers relating to the importance of feedback, how they learned about feedback, how they communicate with students, and the most appropriate way of giving feedback to students.

The first version of the AMFI is currently being trialled with lecturers at one university and will then be refined to send out to a number of institutions across the UK. If you would like to take part in this research please contact Professor Lin Norton directly at nortonl@hope.ac.uk

Write Now Final Self-Evaluation

Write Now submitted its Final Self-Evaluation Report (Final Evaluation) to its funders, the Higher Education Funding Council, in March 2010. External evaluators at the University of Derby were commissioned to conduct an Impact Assessment that provided the evidence base for the Final Evaluation. The Impact Assessment involved 52 in-depth semi-structured interviews, online questionnaire surveys with 87 respondents, and a review of relevant published educational policy papers.

The objectives of the report were to assess the impact of Write Now on its host institutions (London Metropolitan University, Liverpool Hope University and Aston University), on the higher education sector in the UK and overseas, and on UK HE policy. Some of the key findings of the Final Evaluation are briefly discussed below and are further illustrated by representative quotations from the Impact Assessment (see boxes).

The Impact Assessment provided evidence that the student peer writing mentor schemes at the three Write Now institutions had a major impact both on students who used the service and those trained and employed as mentors. Benefits were demonstrated in student learning and achievement, attitudes and motivation, and personal and professional development.

“It gave me the confidence to believe in what I was writing, and that I could achieve good grades by myself.” (Student survey response)

“As an Access student with little prior experience of academic study, knowing that some support was available really helped me settle into University life.” (Student survey response)

Large numbers of staff at each institution engaged with Write Now in collaborative curriculum development, Write Now-funded staff mini-projects, and other Write Now-sponsored activities. The Final Evaluation includes evidence of significant benefits in improved teaching practice, curricular enhancement, and staff recognition and achievement.

“[Write Now helped us understand] the scalability of writing support and the fact that there needs to be a multi-faceted approach to even get close to improving all students' writing and all academic staff teaching of writing within the disciplines.” (Staff survey response)

“Raising the profile of writing as something that academics and students can improve and work at, and consider as something to study in its own right. I think that’s the message that’s coming out of the Write Now.” (External senior management, staff survey response)

The Final Evaluation also shows that Write Now engaged in a very active, positive way with institutional priorities and agenda, and contributed to university policy and strategy development in ways that have maximised Write Now’s institutional impact and led to many of Write Now’s activities being embedded.

The strategy of employing an evidence-based, research-focussed approach to writing development has made Write Now’s work much more coherent and persuasive. This has underpinned a very successful programme of dissemination, with 56 published outputs and a presence at over 50 high profile conferences, symposia and collaborative events, which are listed in Annexes A, B and C of the Final Report.

To read the full Write Now Final Self-Evaluation report please click here.

Using online tutorials for writing development at London Met

The London Met Writing Centre has recently piloted and launched an innovative programme of online tutorials, designed to offer academic writing development to students who may not be able to attend face-to-face tutorials at the Writing Centre during regular hours. We have been keen to see how the online environment could be used – adopting synchronous chat and voice software - to bring about the collaborative, non-directive approach associated with our face-to-face tutorials. But we have also been keen to see if the online environment might offer something unique for students. Through offering online learning opportunities, we have also tried to support the university’s Teaching and Learning strategy which is attempting to bring about a fully blended learning environment for London Met students.

During the pilot in 2008-09, the London Met Writing Specialist and the Write Now learning technologists tried out a number of platforms, before settling on Adobe Connect, a professional web conferencing tool. Adobe Connect offers capacity for synchronous chat as well as Voice-Over IP and allows students to share documents that they are working on and to use a notepad tool for writing notes, freewriting, brainstorming and drafting. London Met student writing mentors received training in using the software and also in facilitating online tutorials. Feedback on the pilot was very positive. One student stated that: “It was easily accessible and it saved a lot of time as I did not have to travel all the way to uni for the same session.” For another, it was a “very efficient use of resources for the uni and convenient for students… someone in management must be on the ball!”. Moreover, analysis of transcripts showed that effective learning seemed to have taken place and encouraged us to move ahead with the project. This analysis also enabled us to refine our mentor training to emphasise in particular how to work effectively in the online environment.

This year students have been able to book online tutorials alongside regular face-to-face tutorials at City and North campus using the online booking system. This has allowed us to offer evening tutorials for London Met students and even meant that one of our writing mentors could facilitate online tutorials while visiting his family in Florida. We have also been able to use the platform as part of a research exchange programme with Göttingen University in Germany, with London Met student writing mentors facilitating online writing tutorials for Göttingen students.

Online tutorial provision for learning development or writing development remains very rare in the UK. As a result, we plan to share our experiences in an article on the piloting of our online tutorials and we have already presented our preliminary conclusions in a paper delivered at the European Association of Teachers of Academic Writing Conference in Coventry in 2009.

An evening with Royce Sadler
The Liverpool expert lecture

On 11 May 2010 Liverpool Hope University hosted the first of the Write Now series of expert lectures. At the magnificent venue of the Liverpool Town Hall more than 70 colleagues from universities across the UK enjoyed an evening lecture with Professor Royce Sadler from Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.

Whilst the rest of the country watched the news of the coalition government unfold, our guests enjoyed a special event in the regal surroundings of Liverpool Town Hall’s Council Chamber. Professor Lin Norton, Research Director for the Write Now CETL, welcomed and introduced the evening’s speakers: Professor Bart McGettrick, Dean of Education at Liverpool Hope University; Professor Royce Sadler, the Expert Lecturer; and Dr David Dennison, Associate Professor at Liverpool Hope and Head of St. Margaret’s C of E High School.

Professor Sadler spoke on ‘Phasing Out Feedback: towards making it redundant’. Sadler argued that while feedback is intended to make a difference and should lead to improvement, it is often a labour intensive process and, ultimately, an inefficient tool for improving learning. Sadler’s radical approach is to rethink the way that feedback is conceptualised in educational systems by giving students the skills and the knowledge to self-assess and empower their own writing. This he argues can be done if students are given the opportunity to monitor the quality of their work while it is being produced (rather than after completion). Instead of assessors noticing strengths and weaknesses, suggesting corrections that are needed and identifying possible ways the work might be changed, students are enabled to do this themselves. This means detaching themselves from their work and being helped to make the sort of judgments that experts make.

After the lecture, delegates enjoyed sharing ideas at a champagne reception in the small ballroom.

Expert lectures in Birmingham and London

If you would like to enjoy an evening similar to the Liverpool event described above, then why not join us at the last two expert lectures in Birmingham and London:

Professor Lisa Ede, Oregon State University, USA presents on ‘Collaborative Learning: History, Theory, Practice’ on 15 June, 2010 at The Council House, Birmingham.

Professor Andrea Lunsford from Stanford University, California, USA talks on 'The Changing Nature of Writing: findings from the Stanford Longitudinal Study' on 29 June, 2010 at The Royal College of Physicians, London. This event is part of the Writing Development in Higher Education conference (see below).

To reserve a place for what are sure to be popular and stimulating events, please contact Vikki Grimbly at writenow@hope.ac.uk

Writing Development in Higher Education
Book now for international conference

Write Now is hosting the 13th Writing Development in Higher Education conference on “Sustainable writing development: approaches and challenges” from 28 to 30 June 2010 at the Royal College of Physicians in London.

Over 120 workshops, seminars and presentations have been selected from a wide range of submitted abstracts and the conference will be an excellent forum for meeting colleagues from the UK and overseas to explore the future direction of student writing development and writing in the academic disciplines. Some of the highlights include:

Keynote speech: Dr Theresa Lillis from the Centre of Language and Communication at the Open University will give a keynote speech on: The value of local research for sustaining writing development in higher education: the case of ‘academic literacies’
Keynote speech: Professor Andrea Lunsford, Professor of English and Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University, California, will present on: The changing nature of writing: findings from the Stanford Longitudinal Study
Conference welcome: Professor Malcolm Gillies, Vice Chancellor, London Metropolitan University, will open the conference
A wide range of papers and workshops showcasing work by and collaboration between UK and international universities. Just two examples to whet your appetite are:
- A workshop on Establishing and maintaining successful writing groups for research students lead by Claire Aitchison, University of Western Sydney, Australia; and Sarah Haas, Aston University, UK
- A paper on Contextualising generic online academic literacy support: towards an open resource for student writers and their teachers presented by Robin Goodfellow; Marion Puxley, The Open University, UK; and Pat Strauss, AUT University, New Zealand.

For delegates who will already be in London on Sunday 27 June we are also offering an informal evening event “Sunday in the Park”. Join other conference delegates in beautiful Regent's Park for an enjoyable, informal writers' circus, followed by dinner. Full details about this event will be emailed to conference delegates.

To view the full conference programme click here, and to register click here.

Forthcoming events
Presentations by Write Now staff

Academic Writing and Beyond in Multicultural Societies
Israel Forum for Academic Writing International Conference, 28-29 July 2010, at the MOFET Institute, Tel Aviv

An exploration of a formative referencing intervention – Dr Becca Westrup and Wendy Smeets
Researching the role of the Writing Centre in promoting “Writing in the Disciplines” in UK Higher Education – Dr Peter O’Neill and Dr Kathy Harrington

12th International Conference
EARLI Special Interest Group on Writing, 8-10 September 2010, Heidelberg, Germany

Investigating the impact of peer writing tutorials on student achievement - Dr Savita Bakhshi, Dr Kathy Harrington and Dr Peter O’Neill
Writing Narratives: Possibilities for developing students' autonomy and academic participation in essay writing - Dr Becca Westrup

Student Writing in Transition Symposium, 14 September 2010, Nottingham Trent University

Keynote speech: Using student writing mentors to help first years adapt to university writing - Dr Kathy Harrington and Dr Peter O’Neill

Articles in this issue were contributed by: Jane Ferguson, Vikki Grimbly, Dr Kathy Harrington, Dr Kamel Mansi, Professor Lin Norton, Bill Norton, Dr Peter O’Neill, Sarra Saffron Powell, Wendy Smeets and Dr Becca Westrup

For further information: email j.ferguson@londonmet.ac.uk