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Case study: Supporting transition and skills development through technology-enabled dialogue and feedback

Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Cathy Dantec

Summary

Cathy Dantec in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science had observed that some of her first year students were having difficulty adjusting to the level of independent learning required at university, as well as the different language norms and writing styles needed for academic writing. She wanted to use a blend of technology and face-to-face practice to address these issues. In particular, Cathy wanted to provide students with a means independent learning required at university.

Cathy chose to address these needs using a dialogical design based on the creation of feedback interactions between instructors and individual students. The feedback interactions were conducted both face-to-face and also mediated via a cloud-based assignment mark-up tool (Google Docs). The overall aims were to:

  • Improve students’ transition to university study, promoting self-regulation.
  • Provide a framework for investigating effective feedback, from the perspective of both tutors and students.
  • Ensure consistent and high quality teaching without increasing staff hours.
  • Improve student’s transferable skills, employability and general digital literacy.

The aim was to support Year 1 students to develop the following skills:

  • An ability to critically assess and exploit sources for their own production.
  • An awareness of language norms and register in various types of communication.
  • The ability to analyse and therefore acquire language by themselves.

Cathy felt that this would require efforts to maximise students’ self-regulation skills whilst decreasing their reliance on external expert feedback, and also to change their perceptions of learning from passive absorption of external data to active construction of knowledge. She felt that this would require an embedded approach to skills development at the level of the programme and contextualised to the discipline.

Intervention

Cathy's approach aimed to inform student work across the whole programme; not just one module. She identified ‘Apprentissage autonome’, a module running across all three terms of the students’ first year, as the main vehicle for addressing the identified needs. The approach was delivered using the VLE and Google docs through two strands:

Strand 1

Cathy developed a series of exercises designed to improve students’ basic critical skills. For some of the more complex exercises, Cathy developed A4 Word document exercises that included instructions on what to do to complete them (9 in total). These exercises required students to undertake tasks such as editing, refining or critically proofing textual content. Where questions could be delivered using the VLE’s test engine Cathy complemented the document-based exercises with tests in the VLE.

The exercise documents were delivered by scripted creation of a set of Google Documents (a set for each student in the cohort) based on the master exercise documents developed by Cathy. These Google Docs, though not owned by the students, were shared for editing with the students so they can undertake the exercises.

Strand 2

Cathy produced a series of current affairs video clips to watch in the VLE from which the students could pick a subject to write about. Students were then asked to draft a paper, based on research of their chosen video clip. This would ultimately be shared with another student to form a mini-portfolio of the two students’ work. Students shared their drafts with tutors who provided (digital) feedback on the process as well as feedback in face-to-face meetings. The students would then further develop their draft in light of the feedback. The final paper was inserted into a Google Site shared by two students and visible to the teaching staff.

Through face-to-face meetings and online feedback, the tutors made explicit links between online activities, face-to-face activities, the ‘Apprentissage autonome’ module and other programme modules.

Reflections

The transparent, two way process provided a clear window on students’ perceptions in key areas of their development, including their assumptions based on previous learning, their understanding of the purpose and norms of higher level communication, and their capacity to critically review writing.

It also highlighted to staff the importance of modelling and the types of feedback that students best respond to.

As the module progressed the dialogical design enabled tutors to react to student feedback and activity in some of the following key areas and ways:

  • Refine and more clearly articulate frames of reference.
  • Provide training for proofreading/peer evaluation and examples for modelling.
  • Differ the types of feedback and minimum level of information necessary for students to self-correct.
  • Explicitly address some misunderstanding/gaps of knowledge acquired in previous learning.

A key outcome of the change in programme delivery was a shift to supporting students through the process rather than focusing on product. The dialogue centred on “how” rather than “what”. The re-design of the teaching interventions also encouraged students to operate at a higher level rather than merely acquiring language items.

More responsibility was ultimately given to students in terms of their self-management, and the provision of a structured self-study programme also contributed to the students’ development as independent learners.

A further welcome outcome was the building of a much greater shared understanding amongst staff teaching the programme.

Transferable lessons

  • Explicitly integrating individual stand-alone activities within face-to-face sessions (such as exercise completion) and considering how earlier activities in particular are articulated to students can dramatically improve students’ understanding their overarching relevance.
  • Embedding activities across the whole programme (not just in one module) helps maximise the benefits to the students’ learning.
  • Google Docs provides a useful platform for supporting the transparent development of student writing skills but does require appropriate support for students in Google Doc usage, e.g. in how the platform might be used to handle referencing.
  • Google Docs proved to be a useful platform for delivering complex writing exercises to students that could be transparent to teaching staff. Some thought does need to be put in to the sustainability of this in terms of creation of the exercise documents however.
  • The whole model of delivery is potentially transferable to other contexts and disciplines.