This can’t be true. I am checking over the marks my Year 8 Science students achieved on their last "mini" assignment and I am amazed. The lowest mark is a B, a few B+, the majority are A with a smattering of A+. Not what I was expecting. Hoping for, but not expecting.

I guess there may be a few reasons for this:

• The task could have been too easy but I don’t think this was the case. I’ve done the task before in a different way and the results were no-where near this good. 
• Maybe it was because the students marked each other’s work, although I have read through them and must say the marks are accurate.
• It must be because I gave them too much help. Well you can be the judge of that.

In the past I had found myself saying to my students, "Make sure you write it in your own words!" and, "Have you planned what it is you are wanting to say?" and then there’s, "Where did you get your information from?" over and over and over again. So I made the decision to do something about it.

Observing my classes in other year levels, right up to Year 12, I believe the barriers to students achieving a high level of success in their essay and report writing are the inability to:

• plan
• recognise and define new words
• write the information in an original way
• (to a lesser extent) appropriately use references in their work.

I have attempted to meet all these student needs in one strategy.

To limit the amount of "extra" work I was creating, I decided to modify an old favourite. "Harry the Hamburger" has many guises, and many aliases. Basically, this task requires the student to imagine they are a piece of hamburger and map their journey through the body, describing the processes of digestion along the way. Whilst this is a good task as far as imagination goes, it doesn’t encourage much translation of information on the part of the student. As a slight alteration, I asked the half the students to map the path of a nutrient from the small intestine to a cell, and the other half to map wastes leaving a cell and being removed from the body.

The following process outlines the way I approached the assignment. This process is not restricted simply to Science - it could serve similar purposes in many subject areas.

The Process

 

1. Divide into groups

   The students are divided into groups of four. Within each group, the students assign themselves the roles of Timekeeper, Encourager, Head of Research, Head of Design. All members of the group are to acts as Idea Providers.

   The role of Timekeeper is to keep the group moving and ensure an appropriate amount of time is spent on each aspect of the activity. Encouragers recognise positive input to the group. The Head of Research coordinates the research ensuring everybody is participating and finding appropriate information. Head of Design is a fancy name for a scribe. I have found that students love taking on these sort of roles in their learning - they like the "power" and the control they feel. However, all the roles do is point out and give a name to the behaviours that should occur in a group situation anyway.

2. New words

   As a group, the students read through the information and identify any new words and discuss their meaning in the context of the text.

   It surprised me which words the students identified. They did not simply copy out the words printed in bold in the text, they worked through the text and found the words they actually didn’t understand (not all words were Science jargon either). Working in the small group, with everybody responsible for contributing ideas, removed the anxiety often felt by students when asked to point out limited knowledge.

3. The Flowchart

   Working together, the students develop a flowchart of the factual information. The Head of Design produces one flowchart for the group. As each stage is completed, the students write down where that piece of information came from.

   During this stage of the task I was walking around the room, offering suggestions and ensuring groups were working. I think I did this more out of a sense of duty than an actual need by the students. The investigating and discussions occurring were on the topic and almost all students were linking ideas, challenging misconceptions of others and having a fair input to the group.

4. The Essay

   Using the flowchart produced with the group as a base, each student writes an imaginative story. As they cover each step in the flowchart, they reference the information for that step. By this stage, the student has translated the information from a slab of text into a flowchart and back again. They have developed and used a plan, and their finished work should be written in their own words.

   I do not remember the last time my students worked as quietly or diligently on an individual writing task as they did this period. The students benefited greatly from the plan they had developed with their peers - it gave them a starting point and most students used them particularly well. Knowing they were going to share these stories with other people in the class, they took a lot of care with their work and made sure they didn’t give too much away by chatting with those around them.

5. The Evaluation

When all the essays are finished students are paired up, exchange stories and evaluate the product. Checking the validity of the references, the imagination used in the story, and how much they now understand about the topic their partner had written on, the student marks the essay, giving a mark of High, Med, Low,or Not Satisfactory against each of the following criteria:

Imagination

Correct use of References

Accuracy of Information

The level you now understand the topic.

Outcome

At the completion of the evaluation time, I had students running to tell me the mark they had given their partner’s essay. The accuracy of the information was High in almost every case. Reading through the essays myself, after the class was over, I was satisfied that the students had done a very accurate job grading themselves. Watching the evaluation process, I was pleased to see students working hard checking the validity of the information, thinking critically about what was written and questioning ideas they found dubious. I was equally pleased to see the partners defending their use of particular pieces of information and clarifying points for the reader. This level of reflection rarely occurs when students work individually on a task then submit it for grading by the teacher.

I hope that the skills the students have used through this exercise will be re-iterated through other work that they do with other teachers and myself, improving their understanding of their work, their ability to critically evaluate information and the overall capacity to communicate using the written word.