Fostering student engagement in an academic writing class through an electronic academic writing survey

Abstract

Students who show interest in their learning and participate in educational activities and lessons in ways that are likely to result in enhanced learning are often referred to in the literature and by teacher practitioners as “engaged” students (e.g. Axelson & Flick, 2010; Coates, 2005; Trowler, 2010). Higher education institutions and teachers alike agree on the desirability of such engagement, but most would acknowledge that promoting and enabling student engagement is no easy task. In this article, I describe a teaching activity that I tried which aimed to boost student engagement in a lesson for a compulsory academic writing course that few students seemed to be particularly interested in. The activity took the form of an academic writing survey which was administered through our university’s Virtual Learning Environment, and which involved students responding to twelve statements about academic writing (e.g. All academic writing is essentially the same) using the options Agree, Disagree, or I don’t understand this. I suggest that the survey fostered student engagement in several ways, for example by activating students’ mental schemas prior to class and by providing a springboard from which teachers could discuss academic writing in ways that were personally relevant to the students in the class. While the survey described is specific to the course that I taught, I suggest that the principles underlying the effectiveness of the activity can be transferred to other classrooms in other contexts.