Abstract:

In urban private schools across India, writing, and in particular writing in English, despite being seen as an area which requires significant teacher interventions, has not seen major pedagogical upheavals in the last few years. After the pandemic, some schools have expressed concerns that students' reading and writing levels have fallen up to two grade-levels behind, in the absence of active teaching-learning mechanisms to ensure the same outside physical classroom environments.

Educational Initiatives (Ei) has been working with over 180 schools as part of its Mindspark digital learning program. Mindspark English, one of the offerings, contains an open-ended writing feature for students, through which Ei has collected notable data on common writing errors made by K-12 learners. In order to improve the quality of student writing, Ei’s content and product team is researching guided writing models and their efficacy, and how they might be integrated into an online learning environment.

To test the impact of such models, we are working with a school which already incorporates guided writing as part of its curriculum for lower grades. We hypothesize that the incorporation of format, style and prompt-specific writing tools (such as mind maps, visual breakdown of ideal text structure, word clouds etc.), which are keyed towards struggling writers with limited vocabulary, will greatly improve students’ quality of writing as opposed to generic guided writing tools or checklists. Generic guided writing aids tend to be format-specific at best, and do not give inexperienced or transitional writers enough arsenal to express themselves on particular topics. We will also be making use of the data on common errors to enhance the usefulness of checklists and rubrics given to students for self-evaluation and peer evaluation.

Keywords:

Writing, Guided Writing, Writing Prompts, Rubrics, Teaching, Language.