"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

Data Collection

To collect tweets relevant to the research questions, the keywords writing, essay, and professor were selected as search terms to ensure that data would likely be focused on college-level students (professor)^[1] who were involved in the writing process (writing) of a formal assignment required by an instructor (essay). Although genre, assignment type, course, level, and more were not always clear, students who were tweeting with all three of these keywords seemed to be engaged in a writing project that would be graded by an instructor. Additionally, all three of these search terms were necessary in order to create a data set that fit the aim of the study. For example, initial searches using only writing and professor resulted in tweets about writing emails to professors, writing evaluations of professors, creative writing, and, among many others, choosing a major that requires large amounts of writing. Adding essay as a keyword helped locate tweets focused on formal writing assignments (i.e. not journal entries, discussion-board posts, etc.). Specific genres were not typically clear; however, our goal of identifying pedagogical practices does not rely on specific genres: our focus is any formal writing assignment. While these keywords certainly do not provide a perfect dataset, as we can only assume these are tweets from students, they returned a collection of tweets indicating that a student-author was engaged in required writing for a professor and tweeted about it organically.

The keywords were then input into Twitter’s search tool, which responds to Boolean logic (professor AND writing AND essay) and provides a list of tweets that include at least one instance of all keywords. Tweets that included all three keywords were viewed in chronological order. We narrowed our search from January 1, 2017, through April 30, 2017. From this list, tweets not posted by students, such as those from professional organizations (writing centers, homework services, etc.) were eliminated. Additionally, tweets that were connected to a particular class, usually identified by the use of a hashtag, were considered scholarly and non-public and were not included. Thus, only public, organic tweets from the selected time period were included.

Tweets were then placed into a spreadsheet. The text of the tweet, emojis, and any attached media (gifs, images, videos, etc.), along with design elements such as bolded, capitalized, or italicized words were preserved in order to identify sarcasm, anger, etc. Usernames/ID were not incorporated into the spreadsheet as identifying information was not pertinent to our study.

^[1] The authors are aware that some secondary schools may use the term “professor” but suggest that most of the tweets were likely written by college students.