Introduction

I undertook this blog trial in an attempt to re-engage students with a traditionally difficult module and to increase independent learning. What has emerged from the pilot is that blogs might be an exciting way to provide personalised learning, especially for some of the strongest students. While this initiative took place in only one module in a three-year programme, the interest has been such that a blended learning strategy has been adopted across the programme, embedded in the core skills and methods modules running from term one of the first year through to the dissertation project in the final year. This programme-wide adoption of blended learning presents an ideal opportunity to evaluate the potential of these technologies to enhance teaching and learning on a larger scale and shows how ‘pockets of innovation’ (Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), 2009) can have great influence.

The blog, a contraction of web log, rose to popularity in the late 1990s, with the term ‘web log’ allegedly coined in 1997 (Downes, 2004). A blog might be defined as ‘a mixture in unique proportions of links, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays’ presented in date order (Blood, 2008). A defining feature of blogs, which raises them above the level of the online journal, is that they can incorporate links to other resources and allow interaction and commentary (Williams, 2004). According to one source, there are currently 101,384,857 identified blogs in existence (Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics, 2009).

Blogs are part of a broader category of software known as ‘social software’, which includes forums, wikis and online multiuser games. This term has been in common use since about 2002 to describe such software and to differentiate it from business oriented ‘groupware’ (Fessakis, Tatsis and Dimitracopoulou, 2008). Educational interest in social software arises because it is consistent with current learning theories, specifically social constructivism whereby the learner is an active participant with others in the learning process. Social software allows the development and construction of ‘artefacts’ by learners, thereby mediating this active learning process (Fessakis, Tatsis and Dimitracopoulou, 2008).

Some claim that blogs in educational settings tend to be used in disciplines which are used to the reflective journal as a learning tool, such as in teacher education, where there is likely to be less resistance to blogging (Williams, 2004). However, there is evidence of blogs being used across a range of disciplines and cultures.

Why use blogs in educational settings?

Adopting a social constructivist perspective on learning, Fessakis, Tatsis and Dimitracopoulou 2008 suggest that the learner has to make sense of what he or she is learning and this is done in a community of learners. Knowledge is generated, not found, and its construction comes via dialogue with others, whether those ‘others’ are texts, students in classrooms or fellow learners in online spaces. Seen from this perspective, some e-learning tools, judiciously used, might be helpful additions to the teaching and learning process in allowing a different way of sense-making for learners, or a different way of communicating with their community of learners, or indeed bringing an entirely new community into their learning experiences. Blogs have considerable potential here. Writing is a crucial part of the sense-making process. An added benefit of the blog is that it facilitates reflection; writing a blog can be done slowly and at a time when the student is ready to write, whereas a classroom discussion demands immediate participation. The blog provides a written record, whereas the student’s spoken contribution to a classroom debate vanishes into air.

There are sector-wide drivers for the adoption of blended and e-learning within higher education. The HEFCE sees improved and wider use of new technologies as one of the principal ways that universities will meet learners’ expectations as well as cater to new markets (HEFCE, 2009). It views a key challenge for institutions as being to move beyond ‘pockets of innovative practice carried out by enthusiasts’ (HEFCE, 2009: 7) to encourage a more strategic adoption of blended learning. Incorporating elements of e-learning into the teaching and learning process should not be seen to threaten the integrity of courses or imperil students’ achievements; research suggests that levels of engagement and achievement of e-learning students match and sometimes supersede those of students in traditional learning environments (Suanpang, Petocz and Kalceff, 2004).

Research has shown that both individual and group blogs can bring many benefits to the teaching and learning process:

• Students can read and comment on each other’s work and value feedback from fellow students (Fessakis, Tatsis and Dimitracopoulou, 2008; Churchill, 2009,).
• Students feel that the tutor is more involved in supporting their learning (Churchill, 2009).
• Blogs can develop students’ writing skills (Tekinarsland, 2008).
• Students take more responsibility for their work because blogs are public documents open to the world (Downes, 2004; Tekinarsland, 2008).
• Knowledge is more effectively developed when students are ‘actively engaged in the construction of an external, shareable artefact that helps them to reflect and collaborate’ (Fessakis, Tatsis and Dimitracopoulou, 2008).
• Writing blogs gives students the experience of writing for a real audience and not just the teacher, and this encourages different skills and attitudes (Downes, 2004).
• Student motivation can be increased when they receive comments on their blogs from people external to the school or university (Downes, 2004).
• Blogs give students the space and the tools to practise the kinds of skills and qualities that universities claim they want to foster in their students, such as autonomy, creativity and co-operation (Williams, 2004).
• From the teacher’s perspective, a key benefit of blogs is that they provide diagnostic information about students’ progress during the assignment process rather than at the end of it (Fessakis, Tatsis and Dimitracopoulou, 2008).

Background and context to the study

I co-tutor on the social methodologies module, compulsory in year two of the BA Sociology programme. Students taking this module were asked to write a blog for a discrete four-week period, which covered the quantitative data analysis workshops.  There were a number of reasons why it was felt that a blog might usefully run alongside this aspect of the course. Traditionally, student engagement with the workshops is low. This is manifested by students rarely doing any work between classes and arriving each week with no or little recollection of material from the previous workshop. Thus a lot of time is taken up recapping previous sessions. Students recording their activities and learning in a blog might mean that they would remember more about the sessions and that they could check for themselves what they did the previous week.

The use of blogs was not the only way that the issue of student engagement was tackled. Previously, I gave all the students the same large dataset, and we worked through exercises in class together using this dataset; the assignment was based on this. This year, students were to develop a research question on a topic of their choice and then find a dataset which would allow them to explore this question. This would mean that there could be 25 students in a workshop, each working on a different dataset, and they would need to keep a record of what they had done and learnt. This change was therefore about promoting active and independent learning; the blog would be a tool for passing over responsibility for both learning and remembering to the students.

Additional advantages of using a blog were that it would always be accessible as it was on the university’s virtual learning environment (VLE), whereas a paper journal could easily be lost or left at home. Moreover, I could ask students to make their blogs public and therefore monitor their learning and interaction with their chosen datasets.

Concerns before I began the blog project were that, as the blog was unassessed, the students might not engage with it at all, resisting when confronted with unfamiliar technology as others have found (Cobanoglu, 2006). I was also concerned that providing time for students to blog at the end of the workshops would take up valuable time in an already crowded curriculum.

Implementation of the blog project

In this section I will briefly describe how the blog was implemented and then make some observations. The blog was used over a discrete-four week period which coincided with the quantitative data analysis workshops. Each workshop lasted an hour and a half, at the end of which ten minutes or so was set aside for the blog. Each Monday, after the two workshops had taken place, I checked the students’ postings and made comments and asked questions. I modified my input regarding the blog each week in the workshops, depending on what guidance seemed necessary as judged by students’ postings.

In the first workshop, the blog project was explained to students, along with a demonstration of the blog tool on the university’s VLE and the option to make postings public or private. General guidance was given about what to include in the blogs, such as the name of the dataset they had chosen to focus on and their research questions. In the second workshop, there was a recap of ‘how to’ with blogs plus a demonstration of how to find someone else’s blog and an encouragement to read and comment on each other’s. I provided a clearer checklist of what to note in the blogs that week. 

Week three saw me clarifying to students the public/private tools in the blog (private was the default option). I requested that students make their blogs public, even if only for a 24-hour window, so that I could check their progress. Students were given no guidance about what to write in their blogs during this week. In the final week, time was again allocated for the blogs, with students given no guidance about what to include. 

During the four-week period I observed in my own blog that:

• Many students accepted the default option and kept their blogs private. This was frustrating as it was impossible to know whether a student had posted to his or her blog or whether they always kept it private.
• General guidance given in the first workshop about what to include in the blog was not enough. Students wrote very little and it was very teacher-focused. A checklist was therefore given out in week two.
• Students blogged more freely as the weeks passed and seemed to find their own sense of what to include by weeks three and four.
• There was apparent enthusiasm to keep the blogs, with much keen typing at the end of each workshop.
• The time it took to check the blogs did not feel like a burden. Indeed, it was rewarding to interact with students in this novel way and at a formative stage of their assignment process.

Results of the blog initiative

My initial concerns about the blog initiative – that the students would resist and that giving time for the blogs in the workshops would take up time in an already crowded curriculum – were unfounded. As noted in the section above, there was feverish typing of blogs at the end of each workshop and it felt like time well allocated. It seemed appropriate to give a small amount of time in the workshops to consolidating the learning that had just happened.

In describing the results of the initiative I will use metadata about the blogs to illustrate the level and type of engagement. I will then provide an insight into the kinds of postings made by students to give a flavour of different kinds of engagement. 

Metadata about the blogs

• There are 56 students registered on the module. Of these, 26 posted entries to blogs and made them public. An unknown number of students may also have created blogs, but kept their entries private.�
• Of those who blogged, no one attended less than 50 per cent of the sessions in term one and average attendance for bloggers was 84 per cent. Average attendance for non-bloggers was 55 per cent.
• Average number of postings was 1.7 (but they ranged from 1 to 6); average number of words for entries was 72 (but they ranged from 14 to 190 words long).�
• Only three students included anything apart from text in their entries; these were hyperlinks.�
• Only ten students made more than one entry.
• No students commented on another student’s blog.

What one can conclude from the above is that only half of the cohort appear to have engaged with the blog in any way, and only a small number (n=10) engaged with any frequency. There appears to be a link between attendance at the workshops and engagement with the blog; those who attended well used their blogs more, those who attended poorly were less likely to use the blogs. Others have noted that attendance and ‘engagement’ (however that is defined) appear to be strongly linked (Hopkins-Burke, 2008).

The students used the blogs as a text-based medium, with few seeing the potential for linking to other resources; the interactive potential of blogs was not at all realised. Students may have read each other’s blogs, but they did not comment on them and all interaction was with me; they were still writing for an audience of one.

Only ten students posted more than one entry to their blogs. In an attempt to understand more about these ten students, I looked at the grades they had received in their level 1 research methods course the previous year. This showed an average module mark of 71 per cent for the top ten bloggers. This compared to an average mark for the module across all students of 42 per cent. 

In terms of how these top ten bloggers engaged with the blog, some students’ contributions, while doubtless recording useful information, were very brief and formal, while others were much more personal and expressed frustration as well as pleasure. In the excerpts from the students’ blogs below I have kept the original language and punctuation intact. Permission was granted by all students whose words are used here to reproduce their anonymised blog extracts.

An example of a useful, but very brief and formal posting is given below:

I have looked at the British Crime Survey 06/07 ... and have decided that my topic will be domestic violence, however I still need to establish a research question and find the data set.

Some postings were much more informal and recorded feelings as well as processes:

I’m a little bit behind i guess and so this has made me feel a bit fed up and i've gone in a bit of a strop with myself. a bit like a spoilt child if you like, maybe i should have some 'time out' and come back to this tomorrow. stomp stomp stomp.

Other students noted down their understanding of concepts covered in the workshops as well as noting what work they needed to do:

Ok, so today we looked at chi squared and correlation co-efficiency. correlation co-efficiency shows us the strength of a relationship between two variables. and chi squared shows us how generaliseable the results are to the wider population … plan for the week ahead: i need to go through my variables and re-value them as mine are all scale, which is not true. i also need to pick out certain variables that i wish to use for my project!

Some students adopted a relaxed tone in which their personalities shone through, rather than writing as if for an assignment. One student in particular adopted quirky names for her postings such as ‘Atelier Deux’ and ‘That Friday Feeling’ and swore at her dislike of computers:

I have found a data set. actually downloading it and setting it up in spss took the piss abit cus me and computers are not the best of friends. my data set is about  Neighbourhood Boundaries, Social Disorganisation and Social Exclusion, 2001-2002. i'm very interested in the exclusion part and some of the questions are ones i was thinking of myself. i'm a very happy bunny now!

Here we have an example of someone logging their activities and what they’ve found, as well as expressing their emotions, both positive and negative, in relation to the work being done.
 
Conclusions

It is claimed that blogging in an educational context is not blogging, it’s just using web log software, because what students write is constrained and censored and is written for an audience of one, the teacher (Downes, 2004). As soon as they are part of an obligatory course or on a topic that the students are not likely to be interested in, the level of authenticity and engagement in blogs vanishes (Downes, 2004). My own case study supports these observations. The one student who claimed to enjoy the data analysis workshops was the only person whose blog was alive and playful. On a compulsory module, it is possible though disappointing that she was the only one who was writing on a topic that was interesting to her. 

Others have noted that students post entries to blogs if it is part of an assessment and that they drop their blogs immediately afterwards (Williams, 2004; Downes, 2004; Cobanoglu, 2006; Churchill, 2009). This would suggest an instrumental engagement, which runs counter to the idea that blogs might be a reflective learning tool for students. Although only a small number of my students engaged fully with the blog, perhaps it is gratifying that half of them blogged at all when the task carried no marks and was not part of any assessment. 

However, the blog allowed personalised learning to take place, particularly in relation to the strongest students. After each workshop, I viewed the students’ blogs, made comments, and added questions and suggestions. At the time, I was not consciously noting which students were blogging the most and writing the most useful things for themselves. As noted above, these students were top of the year group. What this initiative permitted then was one-to-one dialogue, support and encouragement for some of the most able students in the group. It allowed me to support their learning in a timely and highly personalised way. It was exciting to be able to see what and if the students were learning. Even though half of the students did not write blogs (or kept them private) and only a handful used them fully, watching the students typing away deep in concentration at the end of each workshop felt good and allowed me to feel that the students were more active in their learning. 

This case study was a very enjoyable experience for me. In my own blog, I noted: ‘The other nice thing about this that I like is that I, the novice blogger, am blogging about the students – also novices – blogging. There’s a nice circularity to that and a kind of democracy’ (self-reference, 2008). In future I would like to build me and my blog more into the blog task. The only ‘teaching presence’ (Garrison and Anderson, 2003) in this case study was my occasional question or comment on an individual’s blog; building that teaching presence in more strongly may be beneficial. However, others have noted that a fine line needs to be trodden in such online forums and that over-zealous postings by staff can actually reduce student participation (Mazzolini and Maddison, 2007).

Recommendations

Some very practical lessons from this case study that could easily be implemented elsewhere are that if one wants students to make their blog entries public, very explicit instructions about this need to be provided at the time when students are introduced to the blog tool. Second, initially at least, students need clear guidance about what to include in their blogs. If students are new to blogs and don’t come from a discipline where reflective writing is the norm, asking them to write a blog can be challenging and lead to very instrumental and teacher-focused writing. Moreover, one needs to accept a certain level of resistance from students to the intrusion of technology into their learning if they are not from a technology-focused discipline. Some of these students (who are doing a BA Sociology) told me that they ‘hate computers’ or feel uncomfortable with technology. More support for such students is needed if we want them to engage with e-learning tools, and certainly before such elements are assessed. 

In the current study it was not possible to assess students’ attitudes towards the blogs and how it affected their learning. Other research has noted that online learning had a positive effect on students’ attitudes towards learning statistics, which followed through in better results (Suanpang, 2004). Further research into the impact of e-learning tools on the affective and cognitive aspects of learning, especially in relation to challenging subjects like statistics, would be beneficial.

Research on educational uses of blogs tends to be small-scale and cross-sectional, sampling one moment in time. There appears to be little, if any, sustained, large-scale or longitudinal research on blogs in education. The low status of pedagogic research has been cited as one of the reasons why many institutions experiment with e-learning or blended learning but fail to evaluate fully the impact of these practices (Higher Education Academy, 2006). More research is clearly needed which uses larger samples and longer timescales to understand how blogs might impact on the teaching and learning experience. ‘Pockets of innovation’ are not enough to help us to understand the pedagogic value of social software. An extremely positive outcome of this initiative, therefore, is that the BA Sociology programme team has agreed to extend the use of social software across the curriculum. The programme is currently being rewritten and we have taken this opportunity to introduce a blended learning strategy embedded in the core skills and methods modules running from term one of the first year through to the dissertation project in the final year. This should allow for the necessary ‘scaffolding’ to be developed to gradually accustomise students to using social software as part of their learning journey (Salmon, 2002). This in turn could have a positive impact on student engagement with these tools, with them not just being used by the strongest students. A programme-wide adoption of blended learning also presents an ideal opportunity to evaluate the potential these technologies have to enhance teaching and learning across the curriculum.

References 

Blood R (2008). Web logs: a history and perspective. Available at: www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html (accessed 2 November 2008).

Churchill D (2009). ‘Educational applications of Web 2.0: using blogs to support teaching and learning’. British Journal of Educational Technology, vol 40, no 1. Available online via: Wiley (accessed 15 January 2009).

Cobanoglu C (2006). ‘An analysis of blogs as a teaching tool as perceived by hospitality management students’. Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sports and Tourism Education, vol 5, no 2. Available at: www.hlst.heacademy.ac.uk/johlste (accessed 10 December 2008).

Downes S (2004). ‘Educational blogging’. EDUCAUSE Review, vol 39, no 5. Available at: http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVol/40505 (accessed 9 January 2009).

Fessakis G, Tatsis K and Dimitracopoulou A (2008). ‘Supporting “learning by design” activities using group blogs’. Educational Technology & Society, vol 11, no 4, pp 199–212. Available at: www.ifets.info/journals/11_4/15.pdf (accessed 7 December 2008).

Garrison DR and Anderson T (2003). E-learning in the 21st century: a framework for research and practice. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

Higher Education Academy (2006). Academy literature review, 2005/06. Available at: www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/York/documents/ourwork/research/literature_reviews/LiteratureReviewsSummarys.pdf  (accessed 9 December 2008).

Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) (2009). Enhancing learning and teaching through the use of technology: a revised approach to HEFCE’S strategy for e-learning. Available at: www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2009/09_12/#exec (accessed 11 May 2009).

Hopkins-Burke K (2008). ‘Exploring the link between student “engagement” and module feedback’. Research into Education, vol 1, no. 2.

Mazzolini M and Maddison S (2007). ‘When to jump in: the role of the instructor in online discussion forums’. Computers and Education, vol 49, pp 193–213. Available via: ScienceDirect (accessed 22/12/08).

Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics (2009). BlogPulse. Available at: www.blogpulse.com/
(accessed 19 January 2009).

Salmon G (2002). E-tivities: the key to active online learning. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

Suanpang P, Petocz P and Kalceff W (2004). ‘Student attitudes to learning business statistics: comparison of online and traditional methods’. Educational Technology & Society, vol 7, no 3. Available at: www.ifets.info/journals/7_3/3.pdf (accessed 3 December 2008).

Tekinarsland E (2008). ‘Blogs: a qualitative investigation into an instructor and undergraduate students’ experiences’. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, vol 24, no 4. Available at: www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet24/ajet24.html (accessed 12 December 2008).
 
Williams JB (2004). ‘Exploring the use of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector’. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, vol 20, no 2, pp 232–247. Available at: www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet20/ajet20.html (accessed 12 December 2008).

Double-entry journals: developing an embedded programme of writing development for first year Early Childhood Studies degree students

Amanda French and Jenny Worsley
School of Education, University of Wolverhampton
Walsall, West Midlands WS1 3BD
Tel 01902 323200
Email: a.french@wlv.ac.uk

Biographies

Amanda French
Amanda French worked in further education and the voluntary sector for nearly 20 years as a lecturer, manager and trainer. She is currently employed as a senior lecturer in Childhood and Family Studies and Education Studies at Wolverhampton University, and is part of a five-year Centre in Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) project which works with teaching staff to develop embedded and blended strategies for the development of first-year students’ writing. Amanda’s PhD research focuses on lecturers’ perceptions of writing and writing development for undergraduates, which reflects her longstanding commitment to innovative and critical pedegogies.

Jenny Worsley

Jenny Worsley is currently employed as a senior lecturer in Childhood and Family Studies at the University of Wolverhampton. Her background is embedded in early years education, primarily as a practitioner, before moving on to teaching in higher education. Jenny is currently undertaking PhD research into the first-year experience of mature part-time students. This is linked to her commitment to the development of new models of learning to enhance participation and access for this group of non-traditional students in higher education. 

Abstract
 
In recent years students have been entering higher education (HE) with a diverse range of writing experiences, especially where they come through non-traditional or vocational routes that require different kinds of writing than in many HE courses (Lillis and Turner, 2001). For the past three years a team of researchers at a school of education in a large, urban, post-1992 university has been working on a CETL (Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning) research project which focuses on developing secure writing identities in first-year Early Years students (Ivanic, 1998). Although this is still a work in progress, it is clear from the data so far collected that the project provides suggestions for how lecturers can embed writing activities into subject-specific modules. At the same time, the importance of writing development to the whole learning process has been positively highlighted for staff and students alike.
 
Key words: writing development, student identity, innovative pedegogy

Introduction
 
This paper reports on a piece of research that is set in a post-1992 university in the UK with a strong widening participation agenda. The study specifically addresses the question of how students’ writing can be developed in their first year. The strategies for developing students’ learning have featured high on the government’s agenda and form part of a wider ongoing debate about the changing functions of a university in the twenty-first century (Barnett, 2000). Undergraduate writing has, over the past 20 years in particular, been increasingly seen as a problem in higher education (HE). Concerns about students’ inability to write at what is deemed an appropriate level surface regularly, not only through informal discussion between lecturers, but more formally and publicly through educational research and commentary (Lamb, 1992, Bennet, Dunne and Carre, 2000; Ganobcsik-Williams, 2006) and press articles (Owen, 2003; Smithers, 2003; Wilce, 2006). They also feature in government policy documents such as the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (DES/DfES, 1997) and the more recent white paper, The future of higher education (2003), which called for a much greater emphasis on the development of ‘communication skills’, including writing.
 
Writing development in the research setting
 
For the past four years, a small research team, based in the School of Education at the University of Wolverhampton has been focusing on developing the writing of first-year students on a modular programme comprising Early Years, Inclusive Education and Education Studies pathways. Many of the students on the programme are qualified and experienced practitioners who have entered HE because early years workforce development initiatives have encouraged them to study for a degree (DfES, 2005). Others have worked either in a voluntary capacity, in placement or in part-time employment prior to coming to university, and many continue to work while completing their degrees. For this reason, their entry into HE often represents a shift from the utilisation of largely practical knowledge in the workplace to a primarily theoretical knowledge base operating in academia. This shift may account for the fact that many of our students experience anxiety and difficulty around writing, especially in the first year. Another contributory factor to students’ lack of confidence about writing may be due to the non-traditional or vocational routes taken by a large majority of students before coming to university. These alternative routes often require different kinds of writing from those expected in HE such as portfolios and observations (Lillis and Turner, 2001).
 
Semi-structured discussions with lecturers in the research domain revealed that nearly all felt that many students did not fully understand what was expected of them when producing written assignments, especially in their first year. While many felt that some students struggled with technical issues such as grammar, spelling, punctuation and referencing, there was a more widespread perception that first-year students’ writing, across the range, did not synthesise course reading effectively and/or express a clear understanding of concepts and theories.
 
Earlier research by the project team found that the research domain’s previous stand-alone module, which delivered study skills and writing development to students, was not ideal. Indeed, student evaluations indicated they many had difficulty in transferring what they had learned to wider writing and study contexts (Allen and Clarke, 2007). There was also evidence from staff development events that this separation of subject-specific content and writing development tended to preclude lecturers from exploring writing development as part of their modules.
 
This study forms part of a wider movement which seeks to encourage lecturers and students to discuss and reflect upon the kinds of writing first-year students are likely to read and produce in HE (Thornton and Coppard, 2006). The action research we used reflected our belief that writing development support needs to be proactive, not only for those students obviously needing support, but to all students as an integral part of the first-year curriculum and learning experience.
 
Traditional models of support for writing development in HE
 
There are two broad models used widely in HE to develop students’ writing. The first is an acculturation model, which does not seek to teach writing as such. This approach operates on the basis that students absorb, through a process comparable to osmosis, appropriate writing practices through exposure to subject-based practices and modes of knowledge. Ganobcsik-Williams (2006) suggests that this model is more common in traditional, research-intensive universities. Within this model there is very little direct teaching of writing development, as the assumption is that technical skills, such as spelling and punctuation, have already been taught and assessed via prior educational qualifications. A lack of explicitness about expectations around undergraduate writing leads to what Lillis refers to as an ‘institutional practice of mystery’, which can lead to confusion and misunderstandings between lecturers and students about written assignments (Lillis, 2001: 53).
 
The second approach to writing support is the deficit model. Unlike the acculturation model, this approach is overtly about teaching students who are perceived to be unable or not ready to produce writing for HE to an appropriate standard (Gonobcsik-Williams, 2006). The deficit model is most commonly found in HE colleges and post-1992 universities and perhaps reflects lower expectations about students’ writing upon entry to university. Delivering the deficit or ‘bolt-on’ model usually takes the form of discrete modules and/or additional institutional provision. Stand-alone compulsory writing or study skills modules are often sold to students as ‘preparatory’ or ‘introductory’, suggesting that they will be expected to write in ways unfamiliar to them. In both bolt-on modules and the kinds of institutional support typically offered through learning centres, the content and advice on offer is generic and delivered by study skills or writing specialists who usually do not have any detailed subject-specific knowledge.
 
Lea and Street (1998) advocate a move away from this kind of deficit model of student writing because it ‘is based on the underlying principle that knowledge is transferred rather than mediated or constructed through writing practices’ (Lea and Street, 1998: 170). Similarly, Wingate (2006) argues that separate study skills courses are ineffective and that learning how to write academically cannot be detached from subject knowledge and the process of learning. The research team, working within this approach, was determined to relocate its writing development strategy away from a generic, skills-based model, which could not accommodate any subject-specific values and expectations, towards the concept that writing can only be understood in terms of its context and purpose (Lea and Street, 2006).
 
New Literacy Studies
 
The main theoretical approach used in this project draws on the New Literacy Studies (NLS) movement (Ivanic, 1998; Street, 1995). NLS does not treat literacy as one self-evident set of skills that allows people to engage in reading and writing. Rather, it argues that people use many literacies (different kinds of reading and writing) in their everyday lives and that these literacies are shaped by their context and purpose. For our sample population of first-year students, we argue that writing is shaped in its broadest sense by institutional expectations and values about what constitutes learning within subject specialism at university level. Its purpose is primarily driven by the need to assess that knowledge transfer has taken place within a module. In this sense, the students’ written assignments evidence the learning outcomes of the module.
 
We wanted to encourage lecturers to discuss and share their understanding, expectations and possible uncertainties around writing explicitly with their students as part of their subject-specific teaching. This sharing of experience is an acknowledgment that tutors are also often struggling with their writing and is an important part of the ‘situated learning’ model outlined by Lave and Wenger (1992). Lillis (2001) highlights the important function of lecturers’ expectations of students’ writing. These expectations relate not only to technical accuracy in areas such as sentence structure and the correct use of punctuation but also, as pointed out earlier, to students’ abilities to structure an argument, make connections between different concepts and engage critically with subject-specific literature.
 
Street (2001: 11) advocates that literacy practices can be defined as ‘particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing in cultural contexts’. Lea and Street’s model of ‘academic socialisation’ argues for a move away from the acquisition of technical skills via immersion in academic practices to the development of student writing as a more questioning and open practice (Lea and Street, 1998). This approach draws on previous research spanning almost two decades, which showed how students developed writing identities by recording their thoughts about writing activities and using writing as a tool for learning by linking the use of texts to writing tasks and group discussions (Tynjala, 1998; Grief, Meyer and Burgess, 2007).
 
According to Lillis (2001) student writers desire the opportunity for dialogue with lecturers where they are ‘real participants’ in determining the construction and interpretation of texts, thus encouraging greater personal influence in their own meaning making. This model of pedagogy ‘represents an attempt to actively scaffold student writers into a writing practice, rather than assume that they will somehow “pick it up”’ (Lillis, 2001: 158). This reflects Ivanic’s insistence that writing development for undergraduates happens through the negotiation of personal, social and cultural identities and an awareness of the institutional meanings of academic writing (Ivanic, 1998). Similarly, Bearne and Marsh (2007: 135) identify the need in HE for ‘transformative pedagogic practices’, which include an ‘openness to other people’s perspectives’, ‘jointly constructed activities’ and ‘taking account of student identities as members of particular and differing cultural groups’.
 
There was a deliberate attempt on the part of this project to provide an alternative to what Lee and Street call the ‘study skills perspective’ (Lea and Street, 1998). We wanted to encourage a learning experience that empowered students to begin to make some choices over how they approached any given writing task. The project’s emphasis was on Lee and Street’s (1998) more radical ‘academic and socialisation perspective’, which is developmental in nature and focuses on how students can be helped to familiarise themselves with writing for academic purposes required for their degrees.
 
Double-entry journals
 
In an attempt to create an ‘academic socialisation approach,’ a series of interventions was devised to support the sample group of students’ writing. These interventions were designed to be embedded across the first year of study in core modules for first-year students. In planning these initiatives, it was envisaged that students would participate in at least four different activities over their first year in order to develop their writing. These included double-entry journals, peer assessment, essay marking, free writing and recursive feedback.
 
The focus of this paper is the use of double-entry journals (DEJs). These were intended to help restructure writing as an ongoing process of practice, feedback and discussion for staff and students within the HE discourse. Each intervention provided lecturers with situated possibilities for expressing and discussing the purpose of any written assignment. On a practical level, they also allowed lecturers to scaffold students’ responses to their written assignments before they handed in their first piece of assessed work. 

The DEJ is essentially divided into two columns (see figure 1).

Figure 1: Example of double-entry journal - open in new window
 
In the first column, students are given or can choose an extract from a given text which they have been asked to discuss, paraphrase or challenge. In the second column, students respond according to the task they have been set. For example, the student could use the first column to identify a number of key quotes from a journal article and the second column to write, in their own words, what they understand each quote to mean. DEJs can be used in a number of different ways depending on what the tutor and students want to concentrate on. For example, they can be used to help students focus on particular concepts or vocabulary from a given source. Alternatively, they can be used to encourage students to justify an opinion using a range of different sources or to explore how they understand or respond to a text they have been asked to read. 
 
Tutors can use DEJs to help determine the level of their students’ thinking and understanding. DEJs can also be used to try to move students to a higher level of critical thinking by giving them a time and a framework for reflecting on material they have read. By ‘chunking’ the process of integrating material and new understanding into smaller, manageable activities within a module, DEJs can help students to produce writing for specific academic purposes. Primarily, in this project, the interventions, such as writing DEJs, acted to scaffold and support students as they progressed through the subject learning of each core module.

DEJs required students to process information, integrate knowledge and think creatively. Their use provided students with the opportunity to pursue and develop their understanding of designated reading materials within the context of any core module’s wider aims and goals. For this reason, DEJs were often used in seminars or out-of-class activities to extend ideas and issues introduced in a related lecture. In this way, the research built on a pedagogic model which encouraged both the lecturers and students taking part to process and consolidate new ways of learning. The ultimate aim of all the interventions was to introduce innovative practice in order to improve student development as academic writers, (McNiff, Whitehead and Lomax, 2003).

Methodology

A participatory action research approach suited this project as the subject was problem-focused: we wanted to develop first-year students’ academic writing skills. It was context-specific: it only involved students in the first year of their degree. And it looked to the future: we wanted any change resulting from the project to feed into subsequent iterations of the modules.

McNiff and Whitehead, (2002) make the point that action researchers are always researching themselves and their practice instead of researching the practice of others, as more traditional researchers do. Action research projects, like the one under discussion here, challenge the classic subject/object dichotomy of more positivist approaches. We do not share the epistemological premise that requires the researcher to distance themselves from the subjects or activities under scrutiny. Rather, we felt the research would be pointless unless it was shared by those affected by the writing development interventions. For this reason, it was crucial to promote a collaborative research relationship which actively involved students and staff in any change process resulting from the research (Hart and Bond, 1995). We wanted any change to be very firmly located within an ongoing cyclical process, where research, action and evaluation were interwoven into the pedagogy of the modules, not set aside as part of a separate research project. Like so many participatory action research projects, this study started by concentrating on minor changes to pedagogic practice in the research setting, which participating individuals could manage and control. However, the long-term aim is that such small changes may eventually lead to more extensive patterns of change around our curriculum design and delivery.

Although we recognise that there is no standard sequential process in action research, our research design was based on spirals or cycles concerned with looking, thinking and acting (Stringer, 2007), which determined each stage of the research activity. To structure the research we employed an action research spiral which consisted of the following:

·                  identify and analyse a problem (LOOK)
·                  develop intervention(s) to improve the situation (THINK)
·                  implement the intervention(s) (ACT)
·                  observe the effects of the intervention (LOOK)
·                  reflect on these effects (THINK)
·                  repeat the cycle for further improvement (ACT).
 
With regard to the first ‘looking’ stage of the above cycle, we collected and analysed evidence of this group of students’ academic writing at the start of their first year to allow common problems to be identified. Their lecturers were also interviewed to elicit their opinions on what writing development they felt was needed for the core module they were teaching and how best it might be delivered (French and Clarke: publication pending). Using this data from lecturers and students, we created what Kemmis and McTaggart (1998) call a ‘reconnaissance’ about our area of interest: writing development in a group of first-year students.

The next ‘thinking’ stage required us to theorise our pedagogic practices around writing development. Essentially we settled on a situated, student-centred pedagogy concerned with the development of students’ writing identities. Drawing on the ‘acting’ stages of our research spiral, we then developed a range of interventions, including double-entry journals, to use with the sample student group. Upon completion of each intervention we reported back to staff the data we had collected from students regarding the usefulness of that intervention for further discussion and reflection.
Dissemination of the feedback from students was achieved via staff/module team development sessions, research workshops and a poster presentation at our School of Education conference 2008 (see figure 2).

Figure 2: Double-entry journals conference poster 2008 - opens in new window

We worked with eight fellow module lecturers to deliver both subject-specific content and embedded writing development activities. In this respect the project helped us to realise the transformative potential of action research. The double-entry journal activities were carried out as part of our everyday practice because one of the main reasons for undertaking the research was to improve our understanding of what we were trying to get the students to learn and how we went about teaching them (Mejia, 2001). In our role as insider researcher-practitioners, we enjoyed an in-depth knowledge of the students we taught, the curriculum they were following and the written assessment tasks that they would ultimately undertake. We were therefore able to tailor the development of our writing interventions to our students’ learning needs. This last step was particularly challenging considering the increasing diversity of students on our programme. While there may be conflicts of interest related to the triple role of lecturer, colleague and researcher – for example, the issue of students’ or colleagues’ willingness to give honest answers – we believe that the advantages of this kind of action research outweigh any potential drawbacks, as participatory action research is reliant on authentic participation in the social practice that is being researched. This echoes Lewin, who argued that researchers need to be close to the problems they seek to solve and the subjects they wish to study (Lewin, 1946).

Data collection

In order to collect data about the usefulness of the interventions, throughout the research process students and fellow lecturers were asked for reflective feedback on the use of DEJs and their impact on teaching and learning within the modules. There are many variations on action research, however the idea of reflective feedback is central to all of them (McNiff and Whitehead, 2002). The importance of collecting feedback on learning experiences for research has been highlighted by a number of authors, not least because it enables staff and students to get fully involved (Buchanan, 2000; Gibbs and Simpson, 2004; Yorke, 2001). In addition to formal evaluation instruments and field notes, we also wanted to capture an immediate, qualitative response to the impact of the use of double-entry journals. Immediately after completing an activity with the DEJs, we asked students to write down on a ‘post-it’ their feedback. We asked how useful the activity had been and in what ways they thought it had helped to develop their writing. This process of reflection was enacted each time the students completed any task involving the DEJs. This and our own recorded reflections allowed us to build a record of how students rated the interventions. As we started to collate the students’ responses, we found that they often revealed, in very clear and thoughtful terms, the ways in which they were beginning to understand the processes around their own production of academic writing.

An open questionnaire was also sent to staff directly involved in teaching on the first-year core modules, asking for comments on the use and effectiveness or otherwise of the DEJs. The feedback was used to refine and further promote the use of DEJs across the programmes.

Findings

A breakdown of the 250-plus feedback comments we received on the use of DEJ is presented below. To summarise, we codified the students’ comments under five distinct subheadings: reflective and critical writing skills; analytical skills; knowledge and understanding; reading skills; and general writing skills. The following illustrates the different ways in which students felt the DEJs had been useful.
 
Reflective and critical writing skills

With regard to reflective and critical writing skills, there were many instances of students talking reflectively about the process of writing, as the double-entry journal had helped them to: 
 
Identify the difficulties of developing reasoned arguments …
Student A
 
This was also reflected the feedback from lecturers. One respondent wrote:
 
By encouraging [students] to explore the real focus or meanings of what they read double-entry journals (DEJs) almost put students in a position to avoid being descriptive or anecdotal … [DEJs] help them to process information rather than reiterate what they read … [they] can give students the opportunities to learn how to use reading to inform their own thinking …
Lecturer A
 
This included students’ ability to discuss and compare a range of opinions on any given subject:
 
It [DEJS] is useful in the way that they make you think what exactly the quote is saying and how you can link it to other quotes …
Student B
 
Analytical skills

Using DEJs across the course in different modules provided students with opportunities to develop analytical skills such as transferring knowledge, understanding different arguments and experimenting with linking different points of view and arguments in their own writing. As several student participants commented:
 
[DEJs] enable you to look for other quotes that agree/disagree with first point …
Student C
 
Using double-entry journals is a useful technique to critique as it helps you understand what you are reading and interpret your own meaning …
Student D
 
[They] helped me to look at things and put them into my own way of thinking and that people interpret quotes in different ways …
Student E
 
Knowledge and understanding

Knowledge and understanding of the issues and subjects covered by the use of DEJs appeared to be improved. Often student and lecturer classroom discussion and reflection about the activity focused on the importance of challenging theories rather than taking them at face value:
 
For maybe the first time I was able or allowed to think I could challenge a theorist – who says they are right?
Student F
 
Overall, lecturers and students felt that DEJs reinforced what had been taught in lectures and this accentuated the importance of research and reading around the subject:
 
They (DEJs) seem to help students focus on what reading for academic purposes actually is for ... I use feedback on DEJs to emphasise to students what reading and referencing in their own work really means in practical terms. For example it isn’t just about bunging some quotes in. They have to incorporate the secondary sources into their own writing, their own thinking …
Lecturer B
 
Reading skills

As well as engaging students with a wide range of often difficult reading material, DEJs helped students to actively use a range of reading to support their own arguments and to read more critically. After using DEJs, many, like the students below, realised that the act of reading a range of materials was not enough in itself; rather, it is one’s interpretation and understanding of what one has read that is important:
 
I think the double-entry journal exercise was useful because it got you to think about the quote rather than just looking at the quote and including it in your assignment without actually reading through it … Student G
 
From doing double-entry journals I have learned how to actually think about the quotes and analyse them rather than putting it in and leaving it …
Student H
 
General writing skills

In terms of developing more confidence and competence in their writing, DEJs generally appeared to give students a greater awareness of the role writing plays in articulating and presenting one’s ideas within a written assignment. One student commented:
 
… doing it made me think what I really understood about the theory. Putting it my own words was hard but helped me understand …Student I
 
Many students also mentioned how chunking, or breaking down materials for the DEJs, had helped when it came to organising or structuring their ideas for summative assessments:
 
Yes it was quite useful as it helped me break down the main points that need to be discussed. It would help in main essay …
Student J
 
… it gives you a framework for your thoughts and helps you to structure your work …
Student K
 
It also focused attention on what were the most useful quotes to use in their work:
 
I think it is helpful because it makes you concentrate on the useful quotes and makes you break the quote down …
Student L
 
As such, DEJs were often taken up by students as a useful starting point or planning tool for summative assessments, as the following responses identify:
 
I am having a lot of trouble organising my thoughts about the essays and it will be helpful to use this with every book or journal I read so I can find important things. This might help me organise my thoughts … Student M
 
 
I think this is a good and clear way of looking better at an article or at quotes. It makes you think about it in steps/parts so the thinking will be on a whole other level …
Student N
 
When commenting on the usefulness of this writing activity, students frequently stated that although the DEJ had been initially challenging, the process of doing it and any subsequent feedback or discussion had been helpful:
 
Was a little tedious at first, but it’s actually very helpful. It can be really hard to critique an article even though you think you’re going to be fine. When you sit down and try to do it, you think where do I start? So from that point of view it really helped …
Student O
 
In general, lecturers found the DEJs reasonably straightforward to deliver, although it was felt that the sooner and more often they could be used with students, the more useful and effective they became. In particular, tutors valued the DEJs as a tool for expanding students’ awareness of what was expected of them in terms of reading and writing as undergraduates. The activity raised issues for lecturers, not only about what students read but how they read, highlighting the process-led focus of the DEJ activity:
 
I am not sure about it how much it helps students to expand reading but it definitely helps them to use their reading purposefully ...
Lecturer C
 
Reported disadvantages of using DEJs revealed that it was important to explain exactly how they worked and to think about when they were introduced to students:
 
Unless students are familiar with them at an early stage, it can be difficult for students to grasp their usefulness …
Lecturer D
 
It was also important that enough time was allowed for the activity to be carried out. Several students found the experience ‘rushed’ and the environment ‘too noisy to concentrate’:
 
… useful but there was not enough time to complete the exercise. I would suggest getting it as an exercise a week before and discuss it in the following week’s class …
Student P
 
This latter suggestion was subsequently taken up and found to be very successful. However the majority of lecturer views suggested that:
 
Double-entry journals are useful but very time-consuming but in the long run, useful and effective …
Lecturer E
 
Although it was very much a minority view, we did have a few responses from students, such as the one below:
 
 Double-entry journals are useful for picking out quotes and keeping them together but I personally don’t find the activity that useful … Student Q
 
Clearly it is important to recognise that DEJs, like any learning activity, may not be the best way of working for everyone. The need for a diverse range of learning activities echoed the aims of the project as a whole. These acknowledged from the start that students have different learning preferences. While staff and students became accustomed to the different interventions, it was identified that the use of DEJs could become time-consuming and occasionally, despite support and discussion, some students experienced difficulty in interpreting quotes/information for the task.
 
Overall, the student and lecturer feedback on DEJs suggested that our students were beginning to understand that when writing for academic purposes they were engaged in a process of making meaning, in order that understanding and knowledge transfer could take place:
 
I think the double-entry journal exercise was very useful. Although I found it quite hard at first time round, I think as I used them more often and practised with them, they would develop into a very useful tool in my developing academic career …
Student R
 
DEJs, along with other interventions, helped lecturers introduce, though their subject-specific material, the idea that students’ understanding will often evolve and change as they interact with different sources of information and ideas. The importance of reflection, again aided by the use of DEJs, was crucial to this growing understanding. Finally, DEJs were shown in this study to have encouraged students to experiment with developing their writing before embarking on their all important summative assignment writing.

Conclusions

The use of DEJs was designed to consolidate students’ understanding of the processes that they had engaged in to produce their writing for assignments. Research by Marzano (1988) emphasises the importance of meta-cognition and student learning. By writing about what they are reading, students are encouraged to explore how their reading informs their understanding, thus supporting them to become more effective readers (and students). This project sought to explore whether the use of DEJs could help establish some degree of meta-cognition around the process of producing writing for education purposes, which would support students beyond their first year. The reflective feedback with students seems to suggest that it had begun this process.

The interventionist approach, described in this paper, of embedding study and writing development into subject-specific modules has encouraged lecturers taking part in the project to reposition themselves more as facilitators of writing than writing or study skills experts, alongside their role as subject specialists. Much of the work around DEJs involved lecturers using them to help students discuss and interpret new and challenging information. The emphasis was on lecturers supporting the development of students’ writing in order to move them on towards a more confident and informed criticality. Feedback from the students suggested that DEJs had helped them to regard their lecturers as more than just the arbiters and assessors of their writing. Rather, DEJs had helped lecturers to engage in a much more participatory learning journey with their students, as they provided ongoing feedback on students’ writing either through personal contact or peer review through the module. Arguably this creates an additional workload, which can be especially problematic when working with large student cohorts. However, this project shares the view with other researchers that it is important that students have a record of how their ability to write and their equally important ability to reflect on that writing have been part of their learning process (Prowse, Duncan et al, 2007).
 
To conclude, the team has only just started to explore staff and student responses to the project’s programme of embedded writing activities. However, the feedback so far has been largely positive. More staff development is planned around writing development, different models of providing support for students’ writing across the School are being explored, and many of the interventions, such as DEJs, are now becoming standard practice, for all years, across the whole degree programme.
 

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