(17)Ĭategories of Frequently Made Writing MistakesĬorresponding Language Strategies for Students (19) The Argument-Driven Inquiry model comprises activities and tasks such as modeling, coaching, scaffolding, and feedback.
(17,18) The Science Writing Heuristic provides opportunities for discussions during collaboration between students while practicing writing in laboratory activities. Examples of “writing to learn by learning to write” approaches are the Science Writing Heuristic (16) and the Argument-Driven Inquiry. There are various ways to realize the language support that could help students to learn the core ideas and write better texts in chemistry assignments. With these numbers alongside the observations of student performance in written exams, it was hypothesized that helping students to focus on their writing and giving language support in chemistry class could help improve their performance in chemistry assessments. Results of Dutch students in the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (15) (PISA) show similar average scores. Recent reports by the National Center for Education Statistics (14) show that 74% of the 8th graders and 73% of the 12th graders in the United States wrote below the expectations of their grade level or were “low-achieving” writers in 2011. (3) Many secondary school students find it difficult to learn science (4) and struggle to make their understanding visible in written science argumentation. For example, chemistry students must reason in terms of structure–property relationships: they have to relate macroscopic properties (characteristics of substances) to structures at mesolevels (clusters of molecules) and microlevels (atomic level). To answer these kinds of questions, students must analyze and argue using specific subject concepts. Student content knowledge is often assessed through questions beginning with “explain”, “deduce”, “reason”, “describe”, or “design”. Context-based questions require clear, explicit, well-written answers and therefore place high demands on learner language use. (1,2) This means that a context (e.g., bulletproof vest) is used to learn specific concepts (e.g., polymers and its properties). The Dutch national curriculum for senior secondary school science subjects is context-based. The findings suggest that the writing performance of students can be improved by increasing students’ awareness through a simple written prompt, providing language support, and awarding bonus points for properly formulated answers to chemistry test questions.Ĭhemistry education is not about memorizing facts it is about analyzing and understanding phenomena around us. Following promising effects on the performance of 99 students, the intervention was extended with a Part B to find out if, in addition to the prompt, bonus points (for each prompt question one bonus point was awarded if the answer was formulated correctly in terms of language use) and language support (prompt card listing the five strategies, and supportive assignments) could be of extra help to students.
In Part A, a written prompt (arrow symbol with the word “LANGUAGE”) placed in front of context-based questions was implemented to find out if that could help students avoid making any of those mistakes. Second, a two-part intervention study was conducted. After this, five strategies were formulated: focus on punctuation, repeat key question components, show complete reasoning, minimize use of references, and check use of connectives. First, through document analysis of written tests, five categories of frequent mistakes in answers were identified: poor punctuation (capital letters, periods), missing key answer components (omitting concepts necessary to answer the question), incomplete reasoning (logical steps are missing), unclear use of antecedents (meanings of pronouns such as “it” are difficult to discern), and poor connectives (words like “because” are lacking or used incorrectly). To improve the writing performance of secondary school students in chemistry assessments, a set of activities was developed.
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