An empirical test of blogging in the classroom

Blogs are exciting to many educators, who argue that they can be integrated into learning activities to achieve a variety of pedagogical goals. For instance, Oravec argues that weblogs can reduce plagiarism and can help students critically assess online sources and develop a unique writing voice. Others argue that collaborative workspaces such as “wikis” and blogs enrich the learning experience in that they encourage students to revisit, revise and comment upon concepts and to evaluate and respond to the thinking of others. Because the format of blogs encourages students to engage with positions divergent from their own, blogging can potentially enhance analytic and critical thinking skills. Perhaps most importantly, the participatory and decentralized structure of these technologies discourages the “sage on the stage” approach to teaching and instead recalibrates communication patterns so that knowledge-sharing is increasingly student-to-student and student-to-instructor. Finally, incorporating online tools into curricula has the potential to shift learning from a time and space-bound activity that occurs only in the classroom within a specified period of time to an activity that is diffuse, ubiquitous, and concretely embedded in real world issues and events. Hybrid and purely online courses also can benefit from these active forms of Internet-based writing and discussion.

However, while there is much discussion about the potential benefits of these tools, more work is needed to assess their impacts and identify best teaching practices. This presentation will report findings from one of the first empirical studies exploring whether online writing offers a true pedagogical advantage over traditional writing projects submitted on paper. A pilot study testing the effectiveness of blogs as compared to traditional papers in the classroom was conducted by the two authors. Over the course of a semester, students enrolled in an undergraduate course at a large Midwestern university participated in six short writing assignments. Half of these assignments were submitted as traditional, analog papers; the other half were posted online. For two of these online assignments, students posted comments on one another’s blogs. Although data analysis is still ongoing, preliminary analysis suggests that students particularly enjoyed the “commenting” feature of the blogs and felt blogging to be a useful and fresh approach to learning. Open-ended comments made by the student suggest that they saw the primary value of the online assignments to be the interaction with their peers. Findings from the study are reported, with an emphasis on practical as well as theoretical implications.

Since recording the presentation, we’ve had a chance to dig a little deeper into the dataset and are beginning to believe that time on task is really the key. Time on task may be a mediating variable that explains a lot of the variance in the comprehension (quiz scores). So, it’s not that blogging in and of itself led to lowered scores (in some cases), but rather format -> time on task -> comprehension.

One explanation is that students made a conscious trade-off about how they would spend their time because they anticipated blogging would take longer (in the commenting condition particularly) and therefore spent less time composing.
Another explanation which we don’t discuss in the presentation is that students have not yet determined what their “blogging in school” writing voice should be. They have written short papers before, but most haven’t blogged as part of their coursework. They may be importing conceptual frameworks about what educational blogging should look like based on other kinds of informal online writing practices (i.e. IM, personal blogs) and therefore may adopt a more casual (and less time-consuming) written style when blogging for instructional purposes.

I think this is an issue that instructors will really have to grapple with. That is, when students blog for us in the classroom, are they essentially writing a traditional paper which is submitted in a new format? This doesn’t seem to really capitalize on the affordances of the medium and I am not advocating it. But, if we are to really take this up as a new pedagogical tool, what kinds of writing practices are we expecting – and what are their implications for learning outcomes? Will students take their writing less seriously because it’s associated with blogging, a format that often consists of shorter entries, more casual tone, and more personal opinion (sometimes with pointers to evidence, but sometimes not)?

It seems to me that to make blogging comments a useful part of the learning there has to be some point in doing them as far as the learning is concerned. In other words, rather than just a requirement to comment, there needs to be a dialogue set up where students have a conversation based on developing a deeper understanding of the material.

I would be interested in seeing what sort of comments the students made. In my experience, at least at first, you get comments like “nice work John” and it takes some time and practice building an on-line community before the comments become a useful dialogue.

If the commenting does not explicitly add to the understanding then it is not surprising that it did not aid the students in their tests.

Again it depends on the level of the interaction for which you are asking but I have found that a carefully sequenced set of blogging exercise based on specific criteria can aid learning provided the goal of the learning is to encourage the students to think deeply. If the goal is shallow learning then getting a meaningful interaction on a blog either does not happen or does not help the learning.

I have found that getting students to use a blog to reflect on their own learning or to share ideas has been a useful tool in helping students to develop their understanding.

Questions and Answers

Thanks for your questions. I’ve tried to answer them thoroughly but let me know if you have additional points of clarification.

1) It sounds like the blog assignments were mirror images of paper assignments? Is this correct?
- The writing prompts were as similar as possible – although each one dealt with a different topic and set of readings. The only difference between the paper and the blog without comments was the way in which they delivered their work to the instructor. For the blogging with comments condition, they had to provide two comments to others in their group for full credit.

2) Did you allow students to use first person in the blog assignments and papers?
- Yes, many of the prompts asked explicitly for their thoughts and opinions, so first person was appropriate.

3) How did the professor grade and give feedback on the blog assignment versus the paper?
- This was a large course, so feedback was not as robust as it would be in a class with lower enrollment. In general they were given full credit for assignments that met the criteria listed in the syllabus:

  • Most importantly, does the written work address all aspects of the assignment?
  • Is the writing free from glaring typographic, grammar, and spelling mistakes? Was care taken with word choice, sentence construction, and argument presentation?
  • Does the writing assignment (WA) demonstrate a familiarity with and understanding of the readings? Are specific points and arguments from the readings and lectures incorporated into the paper?
  • Does the WA make a thoughtful, meaningful and earnest contribution to understanding the material?
  • Does the WA properly credit ideas and phrases contributed by others?
  • When appropriate, does the WA reference ideas and information discovered by doing outside research?

4) Do you think that Assignment #5 showed far lower quiz and participation scores because it was around Thanksgiving break? (I recall in college that was a time many people just didn’t do their work!)
- WA5 was due Nov 22, so that is a possible explanation. We will do further analysis to see whether relationships we found hold true if this WA is excluded.

5) How did students find one another’s blogs? Was there a master listing or wiki?
- For the commenting WAs, I formed students into groups of 7 or 8. Using our CMS, ANGEL, they were able to post their URLs to their group members.

6) I see that the survey was optional, would this weed out “unmotivated” students?
- Potentially – although they reported their GPAs and there was a wide range. Students received extra credit for the survey, and participation was fairly even across surveys.

7) There are typically students who don’t turn in assignments, did you see any variation in the % of students turning in assignments for each assignment? (More students could have done #5 which then brought the score down?)
- The N was pretty stable around 50 (out of 68 total students) for each survey. Specifically: WA1 (n=52), WA2 (n=50), 3 (n=49), 4 (n=49), 5 (n=50), WA6 (n=51).

In the fall, I am going to repeat the study but in a way that will generate more useful data (ie random assignment). I also plan to do more with commenting and to aggregate responses in a class blog. The study I describe here is just one step and I look forward to collecting more data – and to see what other research is being done in the area!

Continue reading here: Blogs, Wikis, and IM: Communication Tools for Subject Specialists

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