How to Use Quantitative Writing
When designing QW assignments and integrating them into your course, you can follow the same best practices recommended in writing-across-the-curriculum programs.
Jump Down To: Best Practices for Designing Writing Assignments | Evaluating Quantitative Writing
Best Practices for Designing Writing Assignments: Modified for Quantitative Writing
- Articulate your learning outcomes for the course
- Brainstorm ideas for writing assignments that require students to think critically about quantitative data
- Choose problems and questions associated with compelling texts written from a variety of perspectives
- Reverse engineer your course by designing the last assignment first
- Develop earlier assignments that provide "scaffolding" for the last assignment
- Designate a purpose, audience, and genre for the writing
- Create a rubric or scoring guide for the assignment
- Treat writing as a process
Although some writers can produce finished copy in one draft, most writers must use several drafts often making significant global changes between drafts as a result of discovering new ideas and of trying to meet the needs of readers for forecasting, clear topic sentences, headings, good transitions, and unified and coherent paragraphs. Here are some ways to encourage students to take their writing through multiple drafts:
- Emphasize exploration, reflective research, good talking, multiple perspectives. Consider using class time to generate ideas for papers and to help students role-play different points of view.
- Encourage imperfect first drafts. Explain to students that writers often use first drafts just to get ideas out on the table and to begin uncovering the complexity of the topic. Often writers can overcome writer's block by lowering expectations on the first draft. Suggest to students that they can call their first draft a "zero draft," a "discovery draft," or a "see-what I'm thinking" draft.
- Stress substantial revision reflecting increased complexity and elaboration of thought and increased awareness of readers' needs. Often bringing in examples of your own drafts-in-progress helps students understand that their teachers also struggle with writing and need to work their ideas through many drafts.
- Write comments that encourage revision, emphasizing the higher order concerns of ideas, thought content, organization, and development. Where possible, make comments on students' drafts before the final due date. An alternative to reading drafts is to allow rewrites of some papers for a higher grade.
- Consider instituting peer review workshops. For suggestions on how to conduct peer reviews, see Peer Editing Guide (more info) .
- Encourage the value of a writing center for all writers. If your institution has a writing center, encourage all writers to use it, not just those with severe writing problems. Explain that writing center conferences can be particularly valuable at the start of the writing process before the writer has even produced a rough draft.
Evaluating quantitative writing
A quick search of the web will easily unearth a variety of rubrics and other assessment tools for writing and a somewhat smaller number of assessment tools for quantitative literacy. (See the resources page for this module for some examples). Few programs, though, have developed rubrics for assessing quantitative writing. However, authors of several of the examples included in the examples collection have developed rubrics appropriate for their specific assignments. For example, Jean Mach and Michael Burke at the College of San Mateo have devised this rubric for the essays in their "Tools for Thought" courses.
A good example of a general rubric for quantitative reasoning that includes some references to writing skills has been developed by Portland State University to assess portfolios developed by students in Freshman Inquiry courses. Assignments with a quantitative literacy component are scored on six point scale as described in the following rubric:"The Quantitative Literacy Rubric at Portland State University"
6. Portfolio demonstrates evidence of ability to conduct independent research and to integrate the results with other methodologies in original work. The meaning of statistical significance, calculus, a comprehensive understanding of causality and correlation, applications of normal curves and outliers to physical and social phenomena, and an integrated comprehension of linear regression is comprehensively displayed.
5. Portfolio demonstrates evidence of ability to conduct independent research and to integrate the results with other methodologies in original work although not to the fullest extent possible. The meaning of statistical significance, a comprehensive understanding of causality and correlation, applications of normal curves and outliers to physical and social phenomena, and an integrated comprehension of linear regression is present but not fully displayed.
4. Portfolio contains assignments demonstrating evidence of an ability to read, understand, and critique books or articles that make use of quantitative reasoning, using descriptive statistics, understanding the meaning of statistical significance, and by displaying data using appropriate graphs and charts. Assignments are included in the portfolio as separate entities and quantitative reasoning is integrated into other work.
3. Portfolio demonstrates evidence of an ability to read, understand, and critique books or articles that make use of quantitative reasoning, using descriptive statistics (mean, median, mode), understanding the meaning of statistical significance, and by displaying data using appropriate graphs and charts. Alternatively, well-designed and appropriate quantitative reasoning assignments are included in the portfolio, but as separate entities.
2. Portfolio demonstrates evidence of limited ability to define, duplicate, label, list, recognize and reproduce mathematical and statistical elements. Portfolio displays limited or no evidence of meaningful application of these numerical concepts.
1. Portfolio demonstrates no evidence of ability to evaluate mathematics and statistics, including no knowledge of basic descriptive statistics."
from: this web page
At Carleton, the Quantitative Inquiry, Knowledge and Reasoning Program (QuIRK) has devised a rubric for evaluating quantitative writing (Microsoft Word 70kB Dec31 08). This scoring guide distinguishes between "peripheral" and "central" uses of quantitative elements in student papers. Readers assess how the student employs, implements, communicates and interprets these quantitative elements.
REFERENCES
Dawson, Melanie, Peer Editing Guide, http://writing2.richmond.edu/writing/wweb/peeredit.html (Archived Version)
Holston, V. and C. Santa, 1985, A method of writing across the curriculum that works: Journal of Reading, v. 28, p456-457.
Palmini, Dennis J. "Using Rhetorical Cases to Teach Writing Skills and Enhance Economic Learning." Journal of Economic Education, summer 1996.
Carol Minnick Santa, 1988, Content Reading Including Study Systems: Reading, Writing and Studying across the Curriculum: Dubuque, IA, Kendall/Hunt
Saskatoon Public Schools, The RAFTs Technique: http://olc.spsd.sk.ca/DE/PD/instr/strats/raft/index.html.
Identifying your learning goals for your course (typically a short list of 5-8 statements) can stimulate productive thinking about course design. Learning goals typically include an active verb following the phrase "students will be able to . . . ." They state what a student earning a high grade for your course should be able to do. Here is an example from an economics course of a learning outcome that could be assessed through a quantitative writing assignment:
Devise open-ended critical-thinking problems that will immerse students in the analysis of quantitative data relevant to the subject matter of your course. Problems can range from the simple to the very elaborate and can be used either for formal writing assignments or for short exploratory writing. The goal is to engage students in doing the kind of critical thinking and arguing that you most value in your course.
Students can come to understand the real-life stakes underpinning the use of numbers and quantitative reasoning when they read compelling essays that interpret quantitative data in different ways or that otherwise use quantitative arguments to support alternative positions.
The last assignment for a course is generally a capstone that brings together a number of course outcome goals connected both to subject matter and to methods of inquiry, analysis, and argument. By imagining the paper you want students to write at the end of the course, you can assess the paper's difficulty level, analyze its component parts, and identify the "moves" students will need to make. Then, earlier in the course, you can help students develop the requisite skills and knowledge.
Once you know what you would like students to be able to write at the end of the course, you can develop shorter assignments early in the course to help students learn these skills. For example, if the final paper requires students to produce a table or a graph, a simple early assignment could be designed to teach this skill (for example, an assignment asking students to design a graph; to write the title, legends, and labels; and to reference the graph in a short piece of text). Such scaffolding is particularly helpful when you have students in your class with a range of backgrounds and levels of familiarity with quantitative reasoning.
Assignments earlier in the term don't have to be formal papers. Many could be used as exploratory tasks or as problems for small group discussion and oral arguments. The purpose of these early "scaffolding" assignments is to help students develop the component skills needed for the final writing task.
In the real world, writers write to real audiences for real reasons. The exigency that motivates the writing is usually a problem of some sort-a disputed or unresolved question, a condition that needs changing, or a dilemma requiring a course of action. Moreover, writers usually write within a "genre" (memo, white paper, email, scholarly article or conference paper, poster session, op-ed piece, proposal, brochure), and each genre has its characteristic formats and reader expectations. The best writing assignments create such a rhetorical context for writers, often following the advice in the acronym RAFT - Role (or purpose), Audience, Format (or genre), and Topic (or Task (or problematic situation) See The RAFTs Technique for some specific suggestions about using the RAFT technique and Holston and Santa, 1985 and Santa, 1988 for additional background material.
Many theorists believe that writing for different audiences and purposes not only helps students learn to transfer writing skills from one context to another but also deepens engagement with subject matter concepts. Dennis J. Palmini in "Using Rhetorical Cases to Teach Writing Skills and Enhance Economic Learning" argues that:
Here (Microsoft Word 32kB Sep26 06) is an example of a short QW assignment using the RAFT guidelines (John C. Bean, Seattle University. Assignment for a First-Year Seminar on Energy Policy).
Students will do better work if they know in advance the criteria you will use to grade their papers. Spelling out these criteria and placing them into a simple scoring guide will let students know what you are looking for and will speed up your own grading process. Here (Microsoft Word 36kB Aug26 06) is an example rubric keyed to the sample RAFT assignment from the previous section.
