A qualitative study of how writing is used in Catholic secondary schools to foster students' metacognitive skill development
Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: This study addressed the problem of students' lack of writing instruction, which the National Commission on Writing in American's Schools and Colleges brought to the public's attention in 2003.Research in composition studies, in addition, have emphasized that writing is a cognitive tool.Vygotsky (1978, 1986), whose theories provided the conceptual framework for this study, viewed writing as an important tool in developing higher order thinking skills.As a result, this qualitative study sought to discover whether teachers in Catholic secondary schools in a Northern California diocese used writing to help students think and learn.The researcher interviewed eight teachers in the subject areas of English, history, mathematics, religion, and science.The three research questions driving the study focused on teachers' understanding of the term metacognition, teachers' use of writing to foster metacognitive skills, and the obstacles teachers faced when using writing to help students learn.Data were collected from participants' responses to an interview protocol.Responses were recorded digitally, transcribed, and then interpreted through a thematic analysis approach.Although two of the eight participants were unfamiliar with the term metacognition, all of the participants indicated that they had developed strategies for teaching subject-specific writing skills.In addition, they were sensitive to learning styles and aspired to foster their students' critical thinking skills.In fact, several of the participants taught their students metacognitive strategies.The types of writing the eight participants assigned were both expository and imaginative and ranged in frequency from once a week to once a year.Participants, though, faced four obstacles when using writing as a learning tool.These were teachers' clarity in articulating expectations and assessment criteria; the amount of time required to comment on and grade written assignments; students' lack of the critical thinking skills, and sometimes the basic skills, needed for academic writing; and students' resistance to challenging writing assignments and to those they considered irrelevant to the subject matter.In contrast to the Commission's 2003 report, this researcher found that her participants taught writing, valued it as a learning and thinking tool, and, to various degrees, used writing to foster students' metacognitive awareness.
Author: Bonnie Jean Davis
Institution: University of San Francisco
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1645806967