"Student Perceptions of Writing Instruction: Twitter as a Tool for Pedagogical Growth"

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About the Authors

Sarah Lonelodge is a PhD candidate in the Rhetoric and Writing Studies program at Oklahoma State University. She also serves as an assistant director of the first-year composition program and as president of OSU’s chapter of the Rhetoric Society of America. Her research interests include composition pedagogy and religious rhetoric.

Katie Rieger is a PhD candidate at Oklahoma State University in the Rhetoric and Writing Studies program and is an Assistant Professor of English at Benedictine College. Her research interests include student-centered pedagogy; educational technology for distance learning; writing center studies; and the intersection of intercultural communication and technical writing pedagogy.

Contents

Introduction and Literature Review

Research Design and Methodology

Participants and Ethical Considerations

Data Collection

Data Analysis

Findings/Discussion

Pedagogical Implications

Conclusion

Works Cited

 While movements such as WAC and WID provide marvelous ideas for writing in the disciplines, student voices also have much to tell us.

(Hass & Osborn, 2007, p. 11)

Introduction and Literature Review

The implementation of writing across the curriculum (WAC) programs has become a well-established approach. While facilitating student learning through writing and learning to write in the disciplines remains the central focus (McLeod & Maimon, 2000), determining the most effective curricular structure and pedagogical practices for achieving these goals continues to require further research.

With this goal in mind, we suggest that listening to students who organically discuss their learning is a powerful strategy for improving pedagogy in WAC and writing courses in general. Colleges and universities utilize a variety of tools, typically surveys and questionnaires, to measure student perceptions of courses, instructors, textbooks, learning outcomes, and other aspects of higher education in order to create better courses, teaching methods, and overall experiences for students. While the necessity for and significance of these tools are not in question, additional information from a source used voluntarily by students throughout the semester could be useful.

This opportunity to uncover more detailed information about student experiences is possible through an analysis of student tweets. The uniquely public nature of Twitter offers the potential to view students’ frustrations, proud moments, problems, and other thoughts. Therefore, our study utilizes public tweets, which we define as independently-authored and organic and not associated with any particular location, institution type, discipline, course level or other identifying or descriptive information. Through this method of listening to students, the (in)effectiveness of writing pedagogy is illuminated and best practices can be identified. While this aim is applicable to any course that incorporates writing, we focus primarily on implications for WAC programs in which writing is taught by non-writing-specialists in technical disciplines.

While a number of previous studies have measured the effectiveness of writing instruction based on student voices, few have approached student perceptions in the way we propose. Perhaps most often, student surveys, interviews, and/or focus groups are utilized. Michael Hass and Jan Osborn (2007), for example, surveyed 71 students in five courses in order to explore perspectives on writing. Their study resulted in five dominant “themes” for instructors to consider as they design writing assignments: “engagement, commitment, collaboration, a systemic approach, and opportunities for external confirmation” (p. 9). Specific to a WAC program, Naelys Luna, E. Gail Horton, and Jeffrey R. Galin (2014) surveyed undergraduates enrolled in a social work program. They found that pedagogical strategies, such as multiple revisions, peer review, and instructor feedback, were especially effective (p. 401).

While we do not wish to diminish these important research methods, we are interested in the potential limitations of these tools. Writing in 2015, Anne Ruggles Gere, Sarah C. Swofford, Naomi Silver, and Melody Pugh highlight two important factors. First, surveys, focus groups, interviews and similar research methods can affect responses: “as a team of researchers, we represented the institutional entity funding the research, and therefore the responses we received were likely shaped by our participants’ awareness of our affiliations with Sweetland, which oversees the ULWR” (p. 250). Second, the aforementioned methods are somewhat limited in scope: “we are not able to speak to what actually happens in the ULWR classroom. Instead, we speak to how students, faculty, and GSIs conceptualize their activities” (p. 250). While the implications of this study are certainly not diminished by these relatively minor limitations, our focus on public tweets provides some insight into the perceptions of students who are engaged in writing but diminishes the potential influence of audience(s) affiliated with their institution. In addition, the tweets seemed to be posted, most often, in the moment and voluntarily, which not only diminishes the potential issues with recall (see Luna, Horton, & Galin, 2014, for example) as opposed to end-of-semester surveys but also offers some insight into what actually happens in classrooms and during the students’ writing processes.

While many studies have explored Twitter as a subject of research, most focus on the website’s pedagogical implications and possibilities rather than the nature of public, voluntary tweets that are not associated with a particular course. These studies have shown that Twitter is useful in helping students engage with course material and reading assignments (Park, 2013), reinforcing concepts discussed in class (Lomicka & Lord, 2012), and in providing a medium for students to communicate with one another as well as the instructor (Johnson, 2011; Davis & Yin, 2013). The tweets discussed in these and many other studies focus on the pedagogical implications of the Twitter site as a means of communication, engagement, and reinforcement. While this is an important endeavor, public tweets not associated with a class requirement also offer a great deal of insight.

In their study on student tweets, Xin Chen, Mihaela Vorvoreanu, and Krishna Madhavan (2014) focused on public tweets of engineering students. These students used Twitter to discuss problems and frustrations associated with their area of study by tagging their tweets with #engineeringProblems. This study holds significant value as one of the first to utilize “informal social media data” or, what we have labeled public tweets, as data to learn about student perceptions regarding pedagogical practices. The authors discovered several themes from the tweets: heavy study load, lack of social engagement, negative emotion, sleep problems, comments on diversity, and others, which indicate a number of issues encountered by students. While this study focused on only engineering students and only problems due to the negative nature of the hashtag, our interest is in discovering both negative and positive attitudes about writing. Our study, therefore, utilized a keyword search that identified tweets for our purposes rather than a hashtag.

With the ideas of listening to student voices and considering their perspectives about the instructor’s “role in writing assignment design” in mind, we formulated this study as an exploratory inquiry into the complexities of how instructors and their pedagogies might influence students’ perspectives on writing assignments. In an effort to “[discover] what students themselves believe constitutes good writing and which pedagogical choices they perceive as most helpful to them in producing high quality written assignments” (Hass & Osborn,  2007, pp. 1-2), our study focused on the following questions: What do students say about their professors and their writing assignments in public tweets? Based on these perceptions, can we identify beneficial pedagogical practices and/or pedagogical practices that could be improved?