Supporting Executive Functioning & Preparedness in a Writing Course

Senior Lecturer & Writing 2-3 Coordinator

Institute for Writing and Rhetoric

Brian's Dartmouth Profile

Summary

"The UDL interventions described below were designed for and implemented in my Winter 2023 sections of Writing 3: Research and Composition II, which is the second course in the Dartmouth Writing Program's two-term version of its first-year writing course. Intended for those students who identify themselves in the Directed Self-Placement process as less confident in their preparedness for college-level reading, writing, and research, the learning goals for WRIT 3 include furthering the composition skills developed in WRIT 2 and developing research skills. After completing the course, students are able to conceive of, plan, and produce an analytical essay addressing an issue of their choosing that incorporates research. Students are able to generate worthwhile inquiry questions, formulate research plans, and conduct said research through Dartmouth libraries and databases. As part of the composition and research process, students are able to work and think with a variety of sources (primary, secondary, theoretical) as well as assess the quality and relevance of sources. Additionally, students will be able to write with an evident awareness of both the audience and the conventions of academic writing."

O'Connor noted that his students often met the following barriers:

• Difficulty with executive functioning as it pertained to planning and implementing research writing practices. 
• Need for skillbuilding in the area of time management. 
• Lack of preparedness for college-level reading, writing, and research. 

UDL Strategies 

"To help students overcome barriers to executive functioning, expression and communication, and physical access, I implemented a two-pronged term-long research activity. 

Low-stakes and informally, I asked students to track their research activity in a table shared with me. The Research Journal included pre-made fields for students to record the date of activity, the kind of activity, a key takeaway from the activity, and how the activity/takeaway either fits into their larger project or connects to some other activity/takeaway. 

Beginning in Week 3, I checked these journals weekly, providing guidance and suggestions for future activity, as necessary. As reflected in the attached artifacts, instructions for how to productively interact with and maintain the table were provided, in advance. The journal checks were graded on completion, and there were no expectations in terms of quality or quantity of activity, just that the table was complete, up-to-date, and exhibited new activity from the previous check. 

The intervention was intended to help first-year college students manage their time and make consistent, incremental progress toward the term's larger goal, the final essay. 

Mid-stakes and more formally, twice in this on-going process I asked students to present on their progress and their research. The presentations provided brief overviews of student research activity to date, but, more importantly, provided students an opportunity to zoom in on one aspect of their activity/research they found especially interesting or important and to teach me and their classmates about it. The first of these Progress Reports was written. The second Progress Report, though, afforded students the opportunity to choose the medium. They were invited to create a powerpoint, or record a slideshow over which they narrate, or create a video presentation, or a blog post, or a podcast, or a physical poster presentation, or return to the more traditional written form asked for in Progress Report 1. 

This intervention was intended to help students overcome barriers to expression and communication, but also to help reinforce the aims of the first-year writing class. A small part of the open-mode reports entailed learning, minimally, about a chosen medium's conventions and audience expectations. Students were expected to ask (and answer) such questions as: What are the conventions of the PowerPoint presentation or the blog post? What authorial choices arise when working in a given medium? In both the on-going Research Journal and a post-presentation reflection, I asked students to consider what the opportunity to work in a medium other than academic prose helped them to understand about the function of academic writing and their own writing process.

None of the reports were presented live in-class (though doing so was an option). Instead, they were posted to Canvas and engaged with by all class members asynchronously, thus limiting barriers to physical access as well as expression and communication."

The goal of this journal is to provide you with a space to chart, informally, your research progress. Anytime you engage in research activity, great or small, make note of it in the table below. The document will be shared with me and I will periodically review your progress (say, once a week). Feel free to leave questions for me in comments, and I will leave any thoughts or suggestions I have as well.

For all logged activity, provide the following information: 

• Date: The date on which the activity occurred
• Activity: A brief description of the work performed (conducted library or database research? Read an article? Wrote or diagrammed or brainstormed? Whatever the activity, describe it in this column)
• Relevance/Applicability: What aspect of the activity seems especially relevant to your project? How might you use the results of the activity in your project or in the final essay? For instance, did an essay or article you read provide new information that changes your understanding of your topic? Or have you identified a possible interpretive lens that helps you analyze either your primary sources or other sources with which you're engaging?
• Impact: The response here will really depend on the activity, but the goal is to recognize and articulate the greater impact of the activity on future steps in your process. What questions does the activity help you answer? What questions does the activity lead you to? How does the activity or what you've learned/gained from it connect to other research activities? (i.e., how does one essay's ideas compare or contrast to another essay's? How might you synthesize these ideas?) What "next steps" does this activity lead you to take? 

Remember, the goal of this journal is to help you make steady progress on your project as well as keep track of your thoughts on that progress. Good research practices include understanding research activities on their own terms while always trying to situate those activities in the larger whole – even if that whole isn't as well-defined as it eventually will be. Use this space to your full advantage, not just as a thing your professor is making you do.

Note: Brian presents the research journal in a table format (see Brian's Google Doc.) 

Length: 500-750 Words, plus MLA-formatted Works Cited page

Due: Friday, February 3, by 11:59pm

The Assignment

As the title suggests, for this assignment you will provide a report on the progress you've made with your research. The goals are threefold. 

One. Offer a brief overview of your activities to date. In doing so, highlight any patterns of repetition and/or contrast you're discovering in your primary sources and/or secondary sources. How is the complexity of your chosen tradition/norm/convention coming into view through your primary sources and whatever information you've learned? As for your secondary sources, what ideas do these authors seem to share? Where do sources agree and/or disagree with each other regarding the claims, concepts, and terms central to discourse surrounding your topic?

Two. Identify one aspect of your recent activity that really seems important to your project. Provide the necessary information and context for your audience to understand this piece of your research, and offer a concrete explanation of why this is important for you and what you hope to do with it in your final essay. [For what I hope are obvious reasons, these instructions kind of need to be vague because what you do here will largely be tied what you choose to focus on. You might choose something you learned and how this is shaping your thinking on your subject; or, you might choose a primary source you've found that's having an impact on your understanding of your subject; or, you might choose a scholarly article that's providing important concepts, terms, or claims for thinking about your topic and your primary sources; or, you might focus on something I haven't listed here.

Three. Whatever you choose to focus on, what's absolutely essential is adopting the appropriate language and providing the appropriate level of detail for your audience: someone who is interested, but may have no idea what you're talking about or why. That is, treat this as an opportunity to teach your audience about the item you're focusing on. What does your reader need to know? What needs to be explained? What does an unknowing reader need to understand not only the thing you're discussing but it's significance to your project?

[A note on relevance: We're doing this assignment for three reasons. (1) Teaching other people is an incredible way to better understand something we're working on and/or thinking about; (2) forcing ourselves to write with our readers in mind makes us more deliberate in your word choice, our structure, our thinking; (3) aspects of the report may very well find a place in your final essay.]

Note: Brian assigns 2 progress reports in this course and the instructions for each are slightly different (see Brian's Google Doc.)