Design Project: WritingWiz

Team Golden Nugs: Alicia Chan, Emeli Marin, Sabrina Seibel, Tanya Churaman, Christopher

Messina

CS 4660: Educational Technology - Professor Miranda Parker

April 5th, 2018

WritingWiz is an online tool built to help teach writing to college STEM students. Our

goal is to teach students the fundamentals of high-quality writing through a personalized

experience with a structured project-based curriculum without taking away students’ freedom.

Our tool implements multiple learning approaches, such as Learner-Centered design,

Project-Based design, and Authenticity in order to effectively equip students with the knowledge

and writing power that can be applied in the future.

Audience

Many academic professors and industry professionals have the opinion that the quality of

writing produced by university students all around the country is rather poor (Graves, 2013).

This claim is even more evident within the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

(STEM) fields. Many people within these industries echo this opinion, and many students within

the fields get a bad taste in their mouths when they hear anything about writing. Since the

majority of students and professionals would agree with this statement, it might be time to look

at the way students are being taught. The root of the problem does not come from a lack of

ability or a lack of motivation, but rather a lack of proper education. Today, students – especially

STEM students – are expected to learn how to write in several different settings without ever
being taught the proper standards and mechanics (Graves, 2013). In one class, students are asked

to write a summary of a textbook excerpt. In the next, a critique of a technical study. Then, a

research proposal followed by their final thesis. The issue with this is that STEM students

typically only have to take one or two general English composition classes. They are never

taught the techniques of all of these writing genres, yet they are expected to perform to the level

of an industry professional. Students have the ability to learn how to write to these standards but

are not truly given the opportunity. Research has shown that students’ writing abilities are most

enhanced when they are given writing tasks for several audiences, clear guidelines and

expectations, and receive feedback throughout the process. Due to STEM students liking

structure and organization, these students excel in assignments that implement clear guidelines

and expectations, thus supporting these research claims. The fields that they are in are not known

for being particularly creative fields but often have defined procedures for solving certain types

of problems – problems that have definitive solutions or at least one definitive best solution.

With writing, there is not a specific way to address the problem and form an argument. Since it is

highly up to interpretation, students need guidance regarding how to tackle writing prompts.

When STEM students are provided with this level of support and foundation early on in their

academic careers, they will become much more effective writers when the occasion rises to

perform in a real setting.

Literature Review

The struggle that college students – especially STEM majors – experience with writing is

well known, and thus, an extensive amount of research has been conducted on the matter. In one
study, three researchers tried to find the correlation between self-efficacy and students’ writing

abilities (McCarthy, 1985). Over recent years, self-evaluation has become an important part of

the writing process. The researchers were first opened up to the idea of self-review/evaluation

when Donald Murray informed them that when a writer gives him a piece, he always asks a

“series of questions that encourage the writer to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the

work” (Mccarthy, 1985). The researchers hypothesized that students’ perceptions of their own

ability greatly affects the level of work they produce. The testing was performed on a few

hundred college students, and the hypothesis was supported. While the results did not necessarily

indicate causality, they did depict a correlation. When students had the perception that they

would perform poorly, they did worse than the students who believed they would succeed. The

researchers’ experiments led them to find other researchers that also came across the same

findings. Based on the results the team concluded that “when performance improves, belief in

one's abilities increase” (Mccarthy, 1985). These results reveal that over repeated experiences,

with positive reinforcement, students’ perceptions of their writing abilities will improve and thus,

improve their actual writing abilities.

In the 1980’s, researchers from University of North Carolina examined how revision

could help people with the writing process (Fitzgerald, 1987). At the time of this research, the

idea of revision was in a revolution. Before, revision was only viewed as just editing a writing

piece’s grammatical errors, but it was transitioning towards more of a restructuring process.

Revision was now being thought of as a process that “could occur at any time in the composing

process, before, during, and after putting pen to paper” (Fitzgerald, 1987). Revision could be

adjusting the overall idea of the paper or restructuring the piece or even still fixing grammatical
errors. After performing a study on young students, the team found that writers were most able to

“improve content when the discourse-level knowledge was provided for them” (Fitzgerald,

1987). These findings signify the relationship that when writers are given tips about the structure

and the ideas for their essays, they are able to perform better. From the implications of this

experiment, we are able to conclude that novice writers may be knowledgeable about the subject

they are writing about, but they may not necessarily be cognizant of how to present the material

in the format of written communication with strong arguments to help convey their ideas. The

researchers for this study also experimented on a group of college freshmen and found that

instructional support and feedback greatly improved the final quality of their work (Fitzgerald,

1987). The researchers came to the conclusion that students were driven to try harder when they

knew they would be judged beforehand. In addition, the extra revision step to writing enabled the

students to put deeper thought into their writing.

WritingWiz attempts to help students view writing as a general problem – solving

actively by establishing a position on the problem, organizing relevant information, and creating

an effectively supported argument. “Effects of Repeated Practice and Contextual – Writing

Experiences on College Students’ Writing Skills” explores teaching writing skills through a

problem solving context and the effectiveness of repeated practice within a specific writing task

domain. A large scale test was performed on sophomore, junior, and senior business students

with different contextual writing experiences. The participants varied in their participation within

the writing-improvement program. The program placed an emphasis on repeated general writing

and repeated specific writing, viewing writing as a general problem that takes many tries to

master. The results revealed that the writing experience was effective, regardless of the age of
the participant. The students who were more involved in the program experienced higher rates of

improvement. Repeated general writing improved overall writing skill, and repeated task-specific

writing improved writing skill even more effectively (Johnstone, Ashbaugh, & Warfield, 2002).

Our tool aims to increase the effectiveness of writing courses by incorporating web-based

instruction as a supplement to student’s writing classes. Findings from “The Effects of

Web-Based Learning on Struggling EFL College Writers” revealed that the use of web-based

instruction helps students perform better on writing tests. The study aimed to examine if there

were significant differences in achievement between students exposed to just traditional in-class

writing instruction and students exposed to traditional in-class writing instruction and web-based

instruction. The study found the effect of educational technology on student achievement- the

students who received web-based instruction displayed improved quality of writing and attitude

towards writing. Web-based instruction for writing proved to be an important factor in enhancing

writing quality of students (Al-Jarf, 2004).

The curriculum of ​WritingWiz places an emphasis on teaching users to examine critical

questions and argument schemes for their writing. Yi Song and Ralph P. Ferretti explain the

importance of this writing method in “Teaching critical questions about argumentation through

the revising process: effects of strategy instruction on college students’ argumentative essays.”

This paper explains the effects of self-regulated strategy development revising instruction for

college students, specifically targeting the use of argumentation schemes and critical questions.

Students were assessed in three conditions: the first group of students were taught to revise their

essays by asking and answering critical questions about the argument from consequences and the

argument from example schemes while writing about controversial topics; the second group of
students were taught to revise their essays by using argumentation schemes to justify their

standpoint, but did not learn the critical questions; and the control group of students received no

instruction about either the argumentation schemes or the critical questions. Findings from this

study show that those who were taught to ask and answer critical questions wrote essays that

were of higher quality and included more counterarguments, alternative standpoints, and

rebuttals. Students who were taught about critical standards for argumentation increased their

sensitivity to alternative perspectives. Teaching how to examine critical questions and argument

schemes creates better writers that are able to explicitly justify the reasonableness of their

arguments by anticipating counterarguments, addressing alternative standpoints, and rebutting

potential criticisms (Song & Ferretti, 2013).

Learning Goal

WritingWiz hopes to teach college students how to improve the quality of their writing.

While our research focuses on how to help develop the writing abilities of STEM college

students, this educational technology tool will be implemented in introductory English classes.

Thus, all college students (STEM and non-STEM students) will be given the opportunity to learn

additional techniques of writing and have additional methods of improving and writing their

papers.

By teaching college students how to improve their writing skills, this tool aims to achieve

the long-term goal of preparing these students to produce high-quality writings of different

genres (Argumentative Essays, Lab Reports, etc.) that can be applied to various professional

settings in the future. These students must first, however, succeed in completing certain
short-term goals as a stepping stone to this long term goal. One short-term goal that this

educational technology hopes to achieve is to teach students to think about the critical questions

and argument schemes surrounding their paper’s topic in order to be able to justify and convey

the purpose of their writing piece. Students should view the writing process as a problem solving

strategy in order to help them establish their main idea, retrieve the supporting information, and

organize their research to produce a paper that allows for readers to grasp the importance and the

implications of their writing piece. This tool also works towards teaching the value of

self-evaluation and revision to the writing process. By allowing students to learn from experts

and from their own self-reflection, they will be able to have more confidence in their writing

abilities, and thus, over time, enhance their writing skills.

Learning Approach

Our tool facilitates learning successfully by implementing many concepts that we have

covered throughout the semester in the readings. In “Learner Centered Design”, the article

discusses techniques that make the learner a priority, such as scaffolding and personalizing

content for each student. Scaffolding allows learners to have a guide, much like the table of

contents in our tool, and support throughout the beginning of the learning process, slowly giving

the learner independence and introducing more difficult topics as their understanding of the

material increases. Our tool’s design incorporates scaffolding through our project design. The

tool will consist of topics, videos, and writing challenges that start off small and comfortably

ease the user into more advanced writing. Focusing on the learner during the educational

experience is extremely effective because it motivates the learner to perform well. Our tool

creates a personalized learning experience for the user, allowing students to receive direct
feedback, from an expert, on their work. Receiving comments from an expert reinforces the

user’s good behaviors and helps shape the user into a better writer.

Our tool also implements concepts present in “Doing With Understanding”, specifically

project-based learning. Project-based learning helps students gain knowledge and skills by

providing appropriate goals, continuous reflection, and feedback, thus, allowing students to

understand how their tasks can contribute to a big picture project. Our tool instills concepts from

“Doing With Understanding” through its projects. The projects that students will work on are

designed to build off of each other by starting with smaller tasks and working towards tasks with

more parts. The projects assigned have a driving question that allows students to understand

what they are trying to learn. Continuous reflection allows students to understand why and how

the tasks they are assigned to perform relate to the big picture of the project; students must know

how the moving parts work together in order to succeed. Projects will be based around concepts

that the students could later apply to writing projects outside of our tool.

The tool implements elements from “Thick Authenticity”, which discusses the concept of

authenticity and how a more comprehensive view of it is needed to create context for authentic

learning. In order for a learner to get a “thick authenticity”, the learning environment must

contain all four types of authentic learning – personal, real-world, disciplinary, and assessment.

We incorporate authenticity in our tool by trying to personalize the learning experience to make

it more fun for each student. Rather than forcing students to read dry articles or critique papers

on subjects they do not care about, we allow students to personalize their experience to fit their

interests and beliefs. By allowing the students to learn and write about what they are personally
interested in, students develop a “thicker” authenticity and become more involved in their

learning experience.

Finally, our learning approach pulls ideas from “I Won’t Learn from You”, which

discusses a common obstacle that educators and learning tools face: not-learning. Not-learning is

when learners makes a conscious decision to not learn something that they have the ability to

learn. Oftentimes, not-learning is often a self-protecting decision made based on their learning

environment, such as sexist or racist curriculum, objection towards teachers, or their school’s

treatment of students. To avoid not-learning, our tool will make an effort to avoid assignments

over controversial topics and instead, allow students to write about a topic of their choosing. Our

tool will aim to help protect marginalized groups and encourage them to voice their opinion,

providing a platform for students to share their essays if they choose to. In order to ensure that

our tool is promoting learning and not causing discomfort to students that could result in

not-learning, we will ask for user feedback often. The feedback will be taken into account to

redesign our curriculum or change our learning design if need be. If we notice that a student

seems to be struggling, instead of assuming they are inept and unable to learn, we will reflect on

what we could do differently to help the situation. Listening to user feedback and letting students

write on a curriculum of their choosing will let users know that their views are respected,

therefore creating a learning environment that is friendly to students of all backgrounds and

beliefs.

Design

WritingWiz is a website that will be implemented into introductory college-level English

classes. Due to the 2004 study conducted by Al-Jarf finding that students who participated in
both traditional in-class instruction and web-based instruction performed better on writing

assessments with improved writing quality and attitude, this educational tool will serve as

web-based instruction in addition to the in-class instruction in English college-level classes. The

implementation of the website is meant to mirror the principles of Learner-Center Design. In

order to make the writing experience centered around each individual student, this tool utilizes

scaffolding and centering the course material around the current knowledge of each student. This

website contains a Contents scrollbar consisting of the different aspects of writing, such as

Critical Questions, Argumentation, Logical Organization, Mechanics, Problem-Solving and

Brainstorming, Finding Examples or Creating Your Own, etc. When the user clicks on one of

these topics from the scrollbar, the website leads to a page with written content on how to

achieve the goals and a video with a person giving a verbal explanation of the topic with

voice-over commentary over examples. The page will also contain an physical copy of an essay

that mirrors the aspects of the topic with annotation. This example paper serves as a medium to

let students have a guide to assist them as they implement these writing aspects. At the end of

each page, there will be writing challenges that allow students to practice these elements of

writing. At the beginning, these challenges are small with much guidance to help ease the

students into the topic. As they progress through the challenges, the writing tasks become more

advanced with less guidance as the website senses they are excelling on their own. This

application of scaffolding allows students to learn these writing concepts with assistance until

they are more comfortable to implement these elements into their writing pieces. The use of the

Contents scrollbar allows for students to access which element of writing they wish to receive
guidance upon instead of having to look through every topic, thus catering to every student’s

needs and current knowledge level.

WritingWiz works to enhance the writing abilities of college students through

Project-Based Learning. This educational technology tool implements this learning approach

because the goal is to help students understand how to implement problem-solving strategies

when approaching their essays and how to revise their essays. Students should be able to learn

from their writing experiences to help develop their skills over the timespan of the course.

WritingWiz will implement various writing projects throughout the semester in order for

students to apply their writing skills and develop them as they complete writing pieces of various

genres, such as Persuasive Essays, Expository Essays, Research Papers, etc. Each project will

contain a rubric for students to be able to understand what is expected of them. Research has

shown that students are able to produce better writing pieces when they have a deep

understanding of how they are going to be assessed (Graves, 2013).

The topics of these projects will be left to the decision of the students. Giving students

the freedom to write about topics of their choosing embraces the learning approach of “Thick

Authenticity.” On many occasions, the essays students have had to write about have been on

topics that do not spark their interest, such as books from British Literature, articles on topics

that have no meaning to them, etc. To ensure that students have an authentic learning experience

that will teach them the writing skills that they can apply in professional settings, students can

write about any topic they choose for the project as long as it is school-appropriate and follow

the requirements of the rubric. This freedom allows students to explore fields that they are

interested and pertain to their interests, major, or beliefs. Being able to choose one’s topic also
prevents the educational defense mechanism of not-learning. Instead of assigning topics that may

be personally offensive to students and result in them not wanting to write a high-quality essay,

students can pick the topic of their essays to express their opinions and possibly, share it with

classmates if they so chose to. For each project, students can provide feedback on the assignment

to allow instructors to understand if they need to alter the assignments or redesign the curriculum

in order to respect students’ beliefs and/or meet the writing needs of the students.

Once the students have chosen their topic, students will interact with WritingWiz to help

plan out their paper. When students go to the “Problem-Solving and Brainstorming” option on

the scrollbar, they can begin planning for their essay by following the guide provided. The guide

provided tries to lead students to make a stand on their topic, how to look for research, how to

organize their findings, and how to develop their supporting arguments. This idea is derived from

the experiment performed by Johnstone et al. In this experiment, when students participated in a

writing program that implements these problem-solving strategies to writing, their writing skills

improved. By implementing the mentioned idea in WritingWiz, students would be able to

improve their writing skills over time through multiple attempts via the class projects.

In order for students to learn how to improve in the areas of writing that they struggle

with, WritingWiz implements an “Expert Proofread” function. Expert Proofread allows for users

to submit a rough draft of their paper to an expert (someone from the LMC department or

Communications Lab). An expert will proofread their paper and help pinpoint to students where

their essay was lacking, but also commend the areas where the students excelled. By having

experts proofread the students’ papers, students are truly able to understand their strengths and

weaknesses of their writings skills and then, they can revise their essay to apply the feedback
they have received and thus, learn from their mistakes. This idea was inspired by the 1987 study

conducted by Fitzgerald where she analyzed the effects of the revision process upon students’

writing. The feedback provided to the students resulted in students improving on their writing

skills. Thus, WritingWiz tries to embrace the process of revision so students can reflect upon

their strengths and weaknesses and improve, thus increasing their confidence in their writing

abilities which would also result in students performing better as depicted by the study conducted

by McCarthy. The projects of WritingWiz aims to help students gain the writing skills to help

their writing high quality papers with reasonable supporting arguments through the use of goals,

reflection, and feedback. As a result, students are able to understand how these problem-solving

strategies and reflection contribute to achieving how to communicate the big picture of their

writing pieces.

Assessment

The final assessment for WritingWiz will consist of a Writing Project Portfolio. For this

assessment, the tool will be evaluating the expected learning outcomes of: displaying problem

solving techniques to writing, performing self-evaluation and reflection that implement asking

critical questions and evaluating possible argument schemes, and writing a well structured and

organized paper that conveys a central idea with supporting examples and analysis. In order to

assess if these students have met these expected learning goals, the assessment will first consist

of the student creating an outline that establishes the student’s standpoint on the essay

topic/problem of their choosing, organizes the research on the topic, and provides supporting

arguments. This outline reflects the study performed by Johnstone et al. This outline serves as a

medium for students to approach their paper with a problem-solving mechanism in order for
students to actively and critically think how they want to convey the ideas of their paper to the

intended audience. After creating this outline, students can begin to write their rough draft. Upon

completing the rough draft, the students must then fill out a self-evaluation form that forces the

students to analyze these key critical questions and argumentation aspects: whether they have

supported their central idea with evidence, wrote about counter-arguments and supplementing

rebuttals, logically organized their thoughts, and provided their own analysis, examples (if

applicable), and takeaway from their research. These key critical questions and argumentation

are implemented in the self-evaluation form in order for students to produce papers that properly

explain their reasoning behind their arguments while also addressing other standpoints as

depicted in the ​Song & Ferretti​ study. Through this self-revision and self-evaluation, students

can evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their paper. As a result, students can reflect on what

they have excelled in thus far in their paper and work to revise what the aspects of their paper

that needs more work. This self-reflection and evaluation task of the assessment aims to achieve

the results from the 1985 study conducted by McCarthy et. al - as the students’ perception of

their writing abilities increase, so does their performance. When student’s analyze the strengths

of their papers, their perception in their writing abilities would increase, and thus, provide

motivation and belief that they can fix the shortcomings in their papers that they pinpointed.

After this evaluation and reflection, the students have the option to submit their paper to an

expert through the “Expert Proofread” service on the web page in order to receive professional

feedback and allow for revision. By an expert giving feedback, students should be able to

improve these areas of the essay’s content and structure that deemed to need more work. In

accordance to Fitzgerald's study, this revision process should result in better quality essays
because students are now cognizant of what areas of their essay were lacking (whether it be the

ideas and arguments of the paper or its mechanics) and how to fix these shortcomings for future

papers. Finally, after final revision, students can submit their papers for final grading.

In order to evaluate this assessment, graders will first analyze the outline to assess

whether students have mastered the problem-solving approach to writing essays. For the outline,

graders will look if the students have asserted their main idea, provided their research, and

formed supporting arguments for the main idea. There are no “set-in-stone” guidelines as how to

outline must be created. As long as the students covered the previously mentioned aspects in the

outline to some extent, they will receive full credit for this portion of the assessment. The next

portion of the assessment that graders will assess is the self-evaluation and reflection. Graders

will reader over the self-evaluation and reflection forms to ensure that students have thoughtfully

reviewed their essays by checking to see if they have thoroughly answers the critical questions

and argumentation aspects that were provided. If the students answered these questions to the

best of their ability, they will also receive full credit on this portion of the assessment. Finally,

the graders will assess the overall quality of the essay. Graders will evaluate the essay in

accordance to the rubric provided to the students at the beginning of this assessment. This rubric

will assess whether the students have logically organized the paper in such that the main idea is

communicated clearly with its supporting arguments and analysis to the audience. In accordance

to the research findings from the Literature Review, these three aspects of the Assessment should

result in a high quality paper that allows students to both practice and improve their writing

skills.
Mockups/Design Photos:

A. This is the main page for the website WritingWiz.

B. When users click on Contents, they are greeted with a scrollbar of all the topics that they

can go through - each with written explanations, videos, and writing challenges, This

scrollbar enhances scaffolding as described in the paper.

C. This tool is integrated with students’ English classes as shown by the English 1102 tab

being highlighted.
D. When students click on the “Final Project” tab (or any project tab), which is their

assessment, they can upload their paper for an expert to proofread. The expert can

provide comments as shown by the red comments on the student’s paper.

 Works Cited

Al-Jarf, R. S. (2004). The effects of Web-Based learning on struggling EFL college writers.

Foreign Language Annals,​ ​37(​ 1), 49-57.

Fitzgerald, J. (1987). Research on revision in writing. ​Review of educational research​, ​57​(4),

481-506.

Graves, R. (2013). ​Why students struggle with writing | University Affairs.​ [online] University

Affairs. Available at:

https://www.universityaffairs.ca/opinion/in-my-opinion/why-students-struggle-with-writi

ng/.

Johnstone, K. M., Ashbaugh, H., & Warfield, T. D. (2002). Effects of repeated practice and

contextual-writing experiences on college students' writing skills. ​Journal of educational

psychology,​ ​94(​ 2), 305.

McCarthy, P., Meier, S., & Rinderer, R. (1985). Self-efficacy and writing: A different view of

self-evaluation. ​College composition and communication​, ​36​(4), 465-471.

Song, Y., & Ferretti, R. P. (2013). Teaching critical questions about argumentation through the

revising process: Effects of strategy instruction on college students’ argumentative

essays. ​Reading and Writing,​ ​26(​ 1), 67-90.