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Education Dive
Report: Students are not spending enough time writing
Shawna De La Rosa
Aug. 12, 2020
Dive Brief:
Students don't spend enough time writing, and writing is not practiced
across the curriculum, new research by The Learning Agency shows. Only
about 25% of middle-schoolers and 31% of high school students practice
writing 30 minutes a day, which curriculum experts say is the minimum
amount of time necessary. A slightly greater number of middle school
(33%) and high school students (34%) only spend 15 minutes a day
writing.
In addition, only 15% of 8th-graders and 13% of 12th-graders practice
persuasive writing each week, though it’s considered a key skill for
college success and in the workplace. Students also aren’t practicing
their writing skills in non-ELA classes such as math and science.
One-quarter of 8th-graders studied said their English instruction
centers on grammar. But more than one-third of Black students and
one-quarter of Hispanic students said grammar makes up most of their
English curriculum, even though grammar instruction in isolation does
not improve writing outcomes, research shows.
Dive Insight:
Many students’ lack of writing skills — and the struggle to teach them — are top concerns for many educators.
Forty percent of students who took the ACT writing exam in the 2016
high school class lacked the reading and writing skills required of a
college-level English composition class. In addition, most recent
results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress said that
75% of 12th- and 8th-graders aren’t proficient in writing. Common Core
State Standards require students to learn argumentative, informative
and narrative essay styles, but little improvement has so far been
measured since these standards were put in place.
In a New York Times article, Kate Walsh, president of the National
Council on Teacher Quality, said part of the problem is that educators
aren’t prepared to teach writing in teacher prep programs. One
technique is to expose students to great writing so they can learn to
hear sentence structure, rather than focus on grammatical sentence
structure.
In an effort to improve literacy, leaders at Chemawa Middle School in
Riverside, California, developed a plan to emphasize writing skills
across multiple subjects that focused on reading, writing, speaking and
listening. The Title I school established a close-reading protocol and
developed specific ways for writing to be taught in ELA, history and
science. At the school, 68% of students are Hispanic and 12% of those
are English language learners.
Another way to teach writing is through “passion blogging,” where
students tap into the topics they love as a way to develop stronger
writing skills and then apply those skills to more formal assignments
like analyses of classic literature. The student’s “voice,” or passion,
expressed in their writing can be weighed in their final grade.
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