Integrating writing into Macroeconomics

Hunter, K., & Tse, H. (2013). Making disciplinary writing and thinking practices an integral part of academic content teaching. Active Learning in Higher Education, 14(3), 227-239.

Background

The authors asserted that many tertiary students had little knowledge of the principles underpinning academic discourse. These principles are rarely made explicit by subject lecturers, remaining largely implicit in course documents and assessment instructions. Moreover, programmes that embed thinking and writing practices into academic content teaching taught by disciplinary specialists remain under-researched.

Aims

The authors aimed to increase scholarly output on the topic by evaluating a programme that sought to integrate the processes of writing and knowledge construction in the context of disciplinary learning within a macroeconomics classroom.

Sample

The study looked at three cohorts of university students – 2007, 2008 and 2009 – with 289, 433 and 309 students, respectively.

Method

Ten to 15% of the 2007 and 2008 cohorts attended assignment writing workshops taught by a non-subject writing specialist. The 2009 cohort went through a compulsory programme consisting of two sets of discussion sessions, ‘A’ and ‘B’ taught by a subject tutor. Each set spanned over three consecutive weeks (20 minutes a week), culminating with a writing assessment. Set ‘A’ first addressed the processes of (a) reading critically, (b) structuring a coherent text, and (c) synthesising; ‘B’ addressed the processes of (a) applying feedback, (b) thought processes for more analytical questioning, and (c) structure and language. Within each 20-minute session per week, there was an explanation stage, for example, of the critical reading of an article, with a provision of exemplars in conjunction with macroeconomics concepts to first develop a more complex level of understanding. Then there was a practice stage where students were introduced to techniques to express that understanding, such as using concept maps.

For the writing assessments at the end of the two sets of sessions, students were asked to describe current economic conditions (Assignment A), and to use appropriate macroeconomic theory to analyse the conditions and appraise government polices (Assignment B). In-class questionnaires and focus groups were conducted to evaluate students’ perceptions of the discussions.

Findings

In 2009, the students did better in Assignment B and showed a 15% improvement in that assignment when compared with their results in Assignment A. This, according to the authors, showed that the students’ analytical writing skills had improved as a result of their training.

Implications

The study offers evidence that subject lecturers making explicit the writing processes in their discipline help students improve the quality of their analytic writing.

Original article retrieved from Sage Journals.