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This 8-week sequence was designed to teach and guide novice writers through the various steps required to complete a research paper.
Category: e-learning development; writing pedagogy
Attributes: lecturing; assignment design; writing assessment
Tools: Moodle; OBS (Open Broadcaster Software); YouTube; Microsoft PowerPoint
Target Audience: first-year college students
Client: Oakland University
Year: 2021
Analysis and Design
Analysis and Design
After 10 years of teaching college writing, I have come to realize that composing research papers is a challenge for most first-year college students. Two issues many students face are 1) uncertainty of how to find, evaluate, and analyze credible sources and 2) difficulty translating their research into an organized, coherent argument.
To address these issues, I redesigned my previous first-year writing curriculum to be much more detailed-oriented and methodical. Specifically, this new curriculum focused on getting students to practice the important pre-writing elements of the research paper writing process.
The curriculum was facilitated through Moodle, the learning management system used by Oakland University, my home institution.
A key element in my curriculum was the inclusion of detailed video lectures that I recorded and designed using Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) and hosted on YouTube. Each lecture included a PowerPoint, a front-facing camera that captured my voice and facial expressions, and closed captioning for accessibility purposes.
Each of my video lectures also included timestamps; past experiences have taught me that students will not watch long lectures unless they have a sense of the content.
Development and Implementation
Development and Implementation
To implement this curriculum, I drew on concepts taken from the Successive Approximation Model (SAM), creating multiple checkpoints along the writing process during which students had to complete short writing tasks and respond to my feedback.
I first prompted students to watch my lecture "Developing a Research Question," in which they learned the importance of crafting a detailed research topic at the beginning of the writing process.
Within this lecture, I taught them two important strategies for coming up with a research question: "term substitution" and "concept mapping." Students were then asked to use either strategy to write their own research question.
Once students developed a research question, they were introduced to the various types of research that can be used to answer their questions. Specifically, I created lectures that covered characteristics of scholarly sources and how to use the university database to find them, as well as characteristics of popular sources and how to evaluate their credibility.
After finding sources that helped them answer their research question, students then learned how to read and analyze these sources and translate the information into a summary.
To demonstrate their understanding of the sources, students completed a short assignment in which they selected five scholarly sources and five popular sources and annotated them. This ensured to me as the instructor that students actually took the time to read through what they found.
After students fully engaged their research and their sources, I distributed the formal research assignment prompt so they could get a sense of how to integrate their research into an actual paper.
As you can see, I highlighted the most important sections in the prompt so that students knew which details need the most attention.
To help students determine how to organize their research and analysis for the paper, I taught them about "the complex claim", a heuristic for presenting an argument composed of five main elements: argument, background, evidence, counterargument, and stakes.
Once students organized their research using the complex claim heuristic, I then showed them how to integrate their complex claim into the structure of an academic research paper. I also gave them an outline template to plan out their process.
Before students turned in the final draft of their research paper, I met with each one individually to answer any specific questions they may have about their research. I used the website Doodle to coordinate and schedule each meeting.
Evaluation and Takeaways
Evaluation and Takeaways
At the end of the semester, I circulated a 600-800 reflective essay prompt that asked students to reflect on:
Their overarching writing process (i.e., prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, proofreading, and collaboration)
Research process (i.e., locating, evaluating, incorporating, and synthesizing sources)
How this assignment demonstrated their strengths as a writer
Moments of struggle
What larger rhetorical concepts they learned through this assignment
These responses will be used to guide any future changes I make to this curriculum. In their reflection, some students mentioned they really enjoyed the slower, more methodical style of writing a research paper. By breaking up a long research project into small, manageable chunks, they were able to easily integrate the project into the rest of their personal and academic schedules.
Many also appreciated the timestamps on each video lecture, as that helped them quickly identify the moments in each lecture that was most relevant to a question or issue they had.
Ultimately, students' research papers were much more detailed and organized, which made the grading process faster and more enjoyable for me.
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