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U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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A newsletter devoted to the support of teaching and learning at the University of Pittsburgh |
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U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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A newsletter devoted to the support of teaching and learning at the University of Pittsburgh |
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Writing Improvement through Team Tutoring
A thirty-year veteran of teaching composition at the University of Pittsburgh at Titusville, Mary Hall, English, recognized a need to improve the writing skills of undergraduate students in her classes at UPT. After surveying faculty, Hall discovered that three to seventy percent of a student’s final grade often depended on the ability to produce college-level writing samples. However, many students were not proofreading or revising their work, making use of writing resources or reference materials (i.e., grammar style manuals, library resources, and online resources), nor generally improving their writing skills from course to course. Therefore, when new writing requirements or contextual elements to the writing process were introduced in other courses, many students did not have the skills to successfully meet the challenges. Writing Improvement through Team Tutoring (WITT), a voluntary, experimental collaboration between faculty, Learning Center tutors, and library staff at Titusville, is developing a database as a means of tracking student progress, sharing information and strategies among tutors, and restructuring tutorials to enhance learning. The hope is that by tracking student progress from course to course, students will be able to increase their retention of knowledge, develop more analytical vocabulary, become more comfortable using reference materials, and be more willing to proof and revise their work. Initially, the database will be comprised of information from student composition papers, and then papers from courses in other disciplines. Data will include grammar and syntax errors, punctuation problems, citation problems, as well as text-style comments from tutors and professors on other common writing problems such as focus, development, and organization. The database will provide individual writing portfolios for each student to help with the learning process. Students, professors, tutors, and librarians will have access to these portfolios so that as new faculty and staff work with individual students from semester to semester, it will be possible to promote continuity in the writing process at each stage of a student’s education. Through the collaborative use of the database, other projected outcomes include increasing faculty awareness of writing support resources available to them for writing assignments in their courses; developing a common analytical vocabulary for tutors and professors to maintain consistency within the database; and, finally, creating a research base of quantifiable data that could suggest changes in classroom strategies for composition and other courses at UPT and other University campuses. | |||||||||||||||||
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A newsletter devoted to the support of teaching and learning at the University of Pittsburgh |
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for Instructional Development & Distance Education |
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