"Discovering" Writing With Struggling Students: Using Discovery Learning Pedagogy to Improve Writing Skills in Reluctant and Remedial Learners

Abstract

Few writing teachers will disagree that teaching writing conventions in isolation is a fruitless, even harmful, pedagogy which does little, if anything, to improve student writing. Teaching conventions, style, and usage (often collectively referred to as grammar) in context, however, proves difficult when struggling secondary students develop good ideas and evidence but fail to clearly articulate them because of their lack of understanding of various writing conventions. The purpose of this study is to test the efficacy of a carefully designed discovery learning activity which intends to push students into metacognition about what they read, how it is structured, and how that structure affects the reader. Three sources of data were used to determine whether students who had learned by discovery were better able to avoid and revise run-on sentences than students who did not learn through discovery pedagogy. The data sources include two sets of essays, surveys taken by the students, and teacher analyses of essays for readability. The results of the data analysis indicate that use of run-on sentences, especially early in an essay, detrimentally affects the readability of student written work; discovery learning activities improve student understanding, application, and transfer of skill; and while students believe they understand more than their written work indicates, the results provide teachers direction for further instruction. The findings of this study indicate that use of discovery learning for writing instruction with struggling learners holds great promise: a group of students generally regarded as academically weak showed greater understanding and application of run-on sentence avoidance than slightly stronger students who learned without discovery methods. This indicates that discovery learning is a method that improves learning among reluctant secondary students, a population many teachers struggle to reach effectively. Discovery learning is not limited to conventions, though: the promise of its application potential extends into a variety of writing skills and concepts. In addition to the run-on sentence discovery activity studied here, discovery activities for various other skills—from semicolon use through creating characterization with dialogue—are included.