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Article Excerpt
First-year undergraduate science students experienced a writing program as an important part of their assessment in a biology subject. The writing program was designed to help them develop both their scientific understanding as well as their written scientific expression. Open-ended questionnaires investigating the quality of the experience of learning through writing were distributed to 165 students. Interviews with six tutors on the writing program were also completed. Key results included that if students were not aware of the potential of learning science through writing, they tended to focus on superficial aspects of the writing experience, such as grammar, rather than the scientific knowledge that underpinned the experience. The results have important implications for the integration of writing experiences into university subjects and tutor approaches to writing tuition.
Introduction
Writing is a key aspect of the student learning experience in higher education. Texts such as essays or reports are an important part of students' writing experience. Previous research into student writing in higher education has found relationships between what students think they are learning through writing essays and the quality of the experience (Hounsell, 1984), how this is related to their feedback (Hounsell, 1987), how it is related to the product of writing (Prosser &Webb, 1994), and how it is related to approaches to writing (Hounsell, 1997). More recent research has looked at what students are learning through writing per se, to complement the earlier research into essays (Ellis, 2003), and has investigated the relationship between students' prior conceptions of writing and their subsequent performance (Taylor & Drury, 2004). These studies have found consistent relationships among the key elements of the student writing experience, such as their conceptions and approaches, and have extended the analysis to include technology. The current investigation adds to this growing body of research by investigating what students at a metropolitan Australian university thought they were learning through writing in an undergraduate science subject, the congruence of their experience with what the tutors thought the students were experiencing, and the implications of this for how the students approached online feedback about their writing during their writing processes.
This interest in student conceptions of their learning arises from a significant body of research in higher education known as student learning research, and within this area, phenomenography. Phenomenographic research, its nascence being with the Gothenburg School (Marton, 1988), seeks to describe qualitatively different ways that students experience their learning. An important characteristic of this research is the acknowledgement that in researching learning it is important to avoid creating boundaries among the learner, learning and the learning context. What is sought, rather, is how such aspects of the learning experience are interrelated and what this might tell us about the nature of quality experiences of learning. This perspective of the interrelatedness among aspects of the experience of learning is consistent with theories of learning and knowing that acknowledge the importance of context and learner, such as the development of the inner speech or thinking of the learner through his or her socialisation in the learning context (Vygotsky, 1962, p. 136), what the activity theorists propose as a coordinated system linking thinking, acting and feeling (Davydov & Markova, 1983; Leont'ev, 1981), and Trigwell and Prosser's position of a constitutionalist perspective on phenomenography, in which there is an internal relationship between the individual and the learning context (1997).
This study adopts a phenomenographical approach to the investigation of the student experience of writing (Trigwell & Prosser, 1997). By doing so, it views learning in higher education as a relational phenomenon and focuses on students' conceptions of the experience of writing and how this is related to quality learning.
A phenomenographic view of learning
A phenomenographic approach to research considers that any phenomenon can be divided into its structural aspect and its referential aspect or meaning (Marton & Booth, 1997). In terms of the experience of learning, a phenomenographic research approach considers key aspects of the student experience, such as their conceptions of, and approaches to learning about, a phenomena, with a view to helping all students improve the quality of the learning experience (Prosser, 1993). A key characteristic of this approach is that to really investigate learning it is most illuminating to adopt a student perspective on the experience. Figure 1 shows the phenomenographic model of learning.
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Figure 1 shows that we can divide the student experience of learning into what students think they are learning (its referential aspect) and how they go about their learning (its structural aspect). The former is the direct object of the learning experience, while the latter can be divided into the act of learning and the indirect object of learning. When we investigate the students' experience of learning through writing, the direct object can be recontextualised as what students think they are learning through writing, while the structural aspect can be divided into the act of writing and its indirect objects of writing.
In terms of learning through writing, it is possible to reinterpret the model to foreground key aspects of writing and the view of learning associated with the writing experience (Ellis, 2004). The referential aspect of the experience can be thought of as the written patterns of the science produced by the students and the scientific meaning at the basis of these patterns. The structural aspect of the experience can be thought of in two parts: one, the writing process and the understanding it engenders as the students revise, reinterpret, synthesise and analyse what they have written; and two, the indirect objects that arise from this, such as communication skills from writing, and if technology is used, technological skills, each underpinned by meaning. When writing, the students are not conceptualised as engaging in the process in isolation, but rather as part of a class of students engaging in the same type of writing task. This acknowledges the fact that the writing experience is enhanced and enriched by interaction among the students about, in this case, the scientific experiments they are completing, and the way in which they are expected to write up their results and discussion. This sociocultural aspect of the experience is consistent with a Vygotskian concept of mediation (Vygotsky, 1986).
Previous research into learning through writing within this model has focused on essays. Investigating the experience of 32 undergraduate students in history and psychology, Hounsell (1997) found variation in how students conceived of their essays. Some conceived of an essay as an arrangement of facts, and did not display an awareness of a cohesive argument as being integral to the essay. In contrast, other students tended to conceive of their essays as an argument. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when asked how they planned to write their essays, the former group reported assembling the material in relation to the topic rather than an argument provided by the student (Hounsell, 1997, p. 116), whereas the latter group emphasised a use of evidence, research and argument in their planning. They viewed the essay emerging from the combination of both the argument and the evidence.
In a closely related study, the quality of the students' writing process was investigated in relation to the quality of the product (Prosser & Webb, 1994). This study used tools and methodologies from phenomenography and systemic functional linguistics in the analysis of the process and product (Prosser & Webb, 1994). In the first part of the study, the quality of student conceptions of essay writing, and their approaches to essay writing, were investigated using a phenomenographic approach. Students who had a deep approach to essay writing--that is, they wrote with the intention of presenting an argument--tended to have a relational conception of essays. Students who had a surface approach to essay writing--that is, they wrote with the intention of producing a set of points in a listing fashion--tended to have a multi-structural conception of essays.
More recently, the focus of investigation has turned to the experience of writing itself and the learning that arises from it (Ellis, 2003).This study investigated the conceptions, approaches, approaches using technology and texts of 43 students in a first-year undergraduate science subject. In addition to replicating relationships of conceptions and approaches that were consistent with the previous related research, this study found that the quality of student approaches to using technology in the writing process were positively and closely related to the quality of their approach to the whole writing experience and the quality of the texts they produced. The technology investigated in the study included a scientific writing database, bulletin board and word processor. Students who reported using the technology in ways that helped them to understand the science they were studying approached the whole experience with the intention of understanding the meaning of the science through their writing.
While the outcomes of this research are encouraging, the studies have used comparatively small samples. This study extends the previous research by investigating the relationship between the writing experience and formative feedback about writing, using a bulletin board, in the context of a larger student cohort. It focuses on what students thought they were learning through writing and how they went about it, including the use of the technology.
The learning context
As a key part of their learning experience, students in a first-year biology course were expected to complete three biology laboratory reports which were an important part of their assessment (Drury & Taylor, 1996; Taylor & Drury, 1996).
The subject comprised lecturers and laboratory classes for 1170 students. The writing program was...
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