Are they really doing more writing?

I am very excited to share some recent research by Andrea Lunsford from Stanford University called The Stanford Study of Writing.  

Andrea Lunsford has been doing research into the writing of college students since the 1970’s.  Her earlier work looked at basic composition students at the college level; some of her later work focused on collaborative writing at many different levels and in different places. 

The research I want to chat about today, called The Stanford Study of Writing, spanned five years between 2001 – 2006.  This study attempted to look at all the writing done by college students, in and out of class. This is really a huge undertaking.  The researchers collected over 14 thousand pieces of writing from a group of 189 students.  

Now, you might be thinking…that research was years ago and probably isn’t relevant.  The fact is that from the end of a research project to publication is often several years in the making.  In the mean time, preliminary data is presented at conferences across the country and can be published in preliminary form in research journals.  It’s not a quick or easy step from research to publication.

I worked on a project similar to this for one year with Dr. Arthur Applebee and Dr. Judith Langer.  I can say from experience that dealing with this paper load is no easy feat.  We had four students in each grade (6, 8, 10, and 12).  Our goal was to collect all of their in-class writing.  (I will review some of the data findings for that study in another post.)  The point of this short tangent is to really applaud the students who contributed their writings and the graduate students that sifted through all of the information to bring out one very important fact:

Students today are writing more than any generation before them!  

Dr. Lunsford’s preliminary data shows that 39% of all writing done by these students is being done outside of the classroom.  Compared to previous generations, this is phenomenal because most people, once they were out of school, hardly ever wrote paragraph length texts unless possibly writing letters or had a job where writing was required.

What kinds of writing are they doing?

Texting

Blogging

Writing walk-throughs for video games (also know as how-tos)

Other internet content writing

Another important finding is that they are writing for specific audiences.  They are not only writing for their teachers, which has been the primary audience of students since writing became its own subject.  The terms good writing and bad writing have always been subjective in school, but now the line gets even blurrier.  Good and usable writing for the internet can be much looser than good writing for school, and it may have more importance for the student.

What can this mean for my teaching?

To me, this means that a variety of different internet writing forms can be exploited in my classroom.  I could poll my class and find out what kind of writing they do outside the classroom in non-academic related activities.  After that, I would use these genres as a jumping off point.  I think this activity can be used in any content classroom.

Sample Activities

For instance, instead of exit writing (a few sentences where students write a question about the class before they leave), you could have them write an exit text and let them use text language.  However, if you aren’t well versed on texting abbreviations, make the students then write out the text until you learn the abbreviations.  This way you not only learn the lingo, students write in a form that they like that they use to quickly inform their friends of information.  

I might have them write a video-game like walk through for a literary selection.  You can present them with a typical video game walk through found on the internet and practice writing them using topics from the class.  They really are nothing more than how-to articles.  Science classes already use walk throughs in their labs.  Math concepts might benefit from a walk through as well.  By presenting it using a writing form that they already know, students might see the connections better and be able to write one of their own.  Then you can follow the next step and explain how the different writing forms compare and contrast to each other.

In addition, I would use this opportunity to explore the different expectations of different writing mediums.  What does it mean to write a blog?  How does this genre form differ from the writing expected in school.

Please feel free to share any other classroom related ideas based on this research for others.