Providing writing instruction in multiple disciplines will help to foster literacy development. Writing instruction enhances student achievement in all subjects. Without strategies for reading course material and opportunities to write thoughtfully about it, students have difficulty mastering concepts. Students who can read with clear comprehension and write effectively about a given subject matter will learn the material much more thoroughly than those who do not.
2. Name and describe four research-based strategies to support writing instruction for students.
- Use low-stakes writing assignments: Learning can be enhanced with shorter assignments that ask students to explain key concepts, summarize arguments on a given topic, or outline a procedure. Research shows that writing regularly in this way fosters learning because it strengthens connections with course reading.
- Provide multiple forms of feedback: Student learning can be enhanced by peer responses to writing, whole class discussion of student writing samples, students' reflection on their own writing, and brief one-on-one conferences. Such strategies, combined with traditional teacher feedback, can help students develop metacognitive capacities that will enhance their learning.
- Employ variety in texts and their presentation: Research shows that effective teachers use many different kids of texts--essays, primary sources, fiction, scientific reports, inventories and so on--to help students learn in all subjects. Teachers can help students improve as readers by giving assignments of varying length or reading difficult texts aloud and pausing to explain their own meaning-making process.
- Employ a variety of levels of reading difficulty: Content-area teachers need to provide accessible materials for those who can't, and this means making available texts with varying degrees of difficulty. All students need to be readers and writers in a variety of subjects, but teachers need to scaffold their learning.
No comments:
Post a Comment