A part of 3.3: Inquiry on Teaching and Learning Poster + Talk session.

Assessing the Development of Sentence-Level Writing Competence in a Second Year Science Course
Jonathan Vroom, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy, UTM
Michael Kaler, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, ISUP, UTM
Christoph Richter, Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, Biology, UTM

While many post-secondary teachers have mixed feelings on the merits of giving students sentence-level (grammatical and syntactical) feedback, recent research suggests that students do in fact want and expect this feedback (Lee, 2004; Blaauw-Hara, 2006; and Elwood & Bode, 2014). Moreover, when students do not receive this feedback, it creates a discrepancy between teacher and learner expectations, which adversely affects student learning (Shultz, 2001; Saeli, 2019). Thus, the question of whether or not we should provide sentence-level feedback has shifted in much research to the question of how we can do it effectively (e.g. Roth, 2015; Al-wossabi, 2019). Along with efficacy, practicality is also a concern, particularly in large courses where graders have limited time to focus on grammar errors. In order to investigate these issues, in the fall term of 2019 and again in 2020 we collected and assessed the sentence-level changes in writing produced over the course of a multi-stage (scaffolded) writing project in a large biology class. We examined both the degree to which students were able to respond to and assimilate specific TA feedback (with feedback drawn from a detailed discipline-specific comment bank), and the degree to which their sentence-level writing improved over the course of working through a multi-stage writing project, with detailed feedback provided only at one stage. Because multi-stage assignments enhance the likelihood of students applying feedback (Hounsell, 2007; Freestone, 2009), we believe that this approach can provide an effective and practical way for students to improve their mastery of sentence-level mechanics.