Middle School

FEATURE ARTICLE

Writing Together: Online Synchronous Collaboration in Middle School Jenell Krishnan, Andrew Cusimano, Dakuo Wang, Soobin Yim Beginning with online synchronous collaborative writing leads to improvements in middle school students’ independent writing.

T

The purpose of this study was to explore differences in essay-w riting effectiveness and length of group writing and independent writing. We also explored the possible affordances of DocuViz for supporting middle school students’ academic writing. We first discuss our theoretical framework, New Literacies Studies, and describe how New Literacies is present within two educational initiatives: the Partnership for 21st Century Learning (P21) and the Common Core State Standards. Next, we provide a review of literature before describing the study’s method in terms of design, classroom writing activities, and measurements of writing. Finally, we describe the results, which include students’ perceptions of DocuViz for supporting online collaborative writing. Two questions framed our study:

hirteen-year-old Gavin entered Mr. Frank’s (all names are pseudonyms) eighth-g rade English language arts (ELA) classroom, retrieved his source material and an iPad, and opened a shared file on Google Docs to complete this week’s collaborative writing activity. He watched for the icons of his other group members, Jaquan and Colleen, to appear in the upper right corner of the screen. Mr. Frank reminded the class, groups of three or four mixed-ability students, that they would use the shared file to plan for and write a source-based argumentative essay. First, though, they would read a text set written by authors with differing perspectives on a central issue to find evidence to support their argument regarding the question, What is the true cost of the farm-to-table movement? Just like that, Gavin, Jaquan, and Colleen began their journey as collaborative writers. Jaquan broke the ice by typing, “Who wants to be the leader?” One line down, Colleen asked, “How do we want to do the essay?” As if to answer both of these questions, Gavin replied, “I think we could like write it together, with all of our ideas together.” Similar to the other five writing groups in this fourth-period class, Gavin, Jaquan, and Colleen were asked to use DocuViz, a free add-on that would use their Google Docs file’s revision history to create a visualization chart of how much each student added and edited their own and other contributors’ writing. Yet, critically, would a better understanding of their contributions result in a better essay? A few weeks later, these three collaborative writers took what they had learned from their collaborative writing activity, and composed a second source-based argumentative essay in Google Docs. This time, though, they wrote independently.

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy Vol. 0 No. 0 pp. 1–11

1. Are there differences (in effectiveness and length) between essays written by groups and essays written by individual students?

JENELL KRISHNAN is a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, USA; email jakrishn@ uci.edu. ANDREW CUSIMANO is an English teacher at Cassadaga Valley Central School, Sinclairville, NY, USA; email [email protected]. DAKUO WANG is a research scientist in the Human– Agent Collaboration Group at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA; email [email protected]. SOOBIN YIM is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Irvine, USA; email soobiny@ uci.edu.

1

doi: 10.1002/jaal.871 © 2018 International Literacy Association

FEATURE ARTICLE

another contributor’s writing, (3) the number of edits made in total, and (4) each writer’s contribution to the final draft. This illustration of the collaborative writing process has its limits, though, as there are many types of contributions that collaborators may make during group writing, and counting characters can only depict the contribution made through keyboard use.

2. What are students’ perceptions of their groupwriting experience?

Writing Together, Learning Together New writing technologies continue to inform pedagogy. Research has investigated how online writing platforms support both individual and collaborative writing, and some studies have suggested greater student engagement with literacy activities (Warschauer, 2006) for wider purposes and audiences (Warschauer, Arada, & Zheng, 2010). Among those technologies, Google Docs is a widely adopted tool that allows writers to collaborate on web-based documents (Beach, Hull, & O’Brien, 2011), which enables synchronous writing in the classroom and teacher-d riven feedback outside the classroom (Zhou, Simpson, & Domizi, 2012). However, when teachers use Google Docs for online peer-t o-p eer learning activities, it may be difficult to understand each group’s collaborative process. Whereas face-t o-f ace collaborative activities provide a visual referent to gauge who is contributing, online spaces do not provide such obvious cues. Given the role that collaboration plays in professional and academic success (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007), teachers need better visibility of the online collaborative writing process. Studying students’ group writing through the use of information visualization tools is one way to learn about how students collaborate online, which is a college and career readiness skill (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers [NGA Center & CCSSO], 2010). Yet, this research has mostly focused on college students’ group-w riting behaviors, and work in K–12 schools has been limited.

Contemporary Literacies For the purpose of this study, we draw on a sociocultural framing of literacy known as New Literacies Studies. In doing so, we define literacy as a social and cultural practice that grows in learners’ dialogue within learning contexts (Gee, 1997). This way of defining what it means to be literate reflects both U.S. educational standards that address 21st-century learning (P21, 2009), and how policymakers define college and career readiness (NGA Center & CCSSO, 2010). Perhaps more importantly, this understanding of literacy is more inclusive and dynamic, and pushes back against more author-centric, expert-focused ways of conceptualizing literacy (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007). The roles that student participation, collaboration, and negotiation play in learning to write have gained popularity as a focus of inquiry of both researchers and educators. By emphasizing peer-t o-p eer learning, educational stakeholders can help all students build the skills often indicative of success in a variety of postsecondary contexts. Online collaborative writing tools can support these educational efforts in new and exciting ways.

Contemporary Initiatives Our study was guided by educational initiatives that notably highlight the value of New Literacies. Using input from teachers, education experts, and business leaders, P21 (2009) developed a framework that outlined “skills, knowledge and expertise students must master to succeed in work and life; it is a blend of content knowledge, specific skills, expertise and literacies” (p. 1). P21 encourages educators to focus on the 4Cs: critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity. Online synchronous writing addresses the 4Cs because students must use critical thinking skills to best support group writing goals; collaborate on how to add, edit, and delete text; communicate concerns when the writing moves misaligned with a student’s own sense of author’s craft; and use creative solutions to negotiate online group dynamics. The Common Core (NGA Center & CCSSO, 2010), too, promotes New Literacies skills. The College and Career

DocuViz: Making the Invisible Visible Making use of the revision history in Google Docs, DocuViz is a general-purpose visualization tool that charts the number of changes made by each contributor to a shared files on each day it was accessed (see Figure 1). Each writer’s quantified contribution is presented in an engaging, color-coded, seismic visualization that tracks the changes made to a file over time (Wang, Olson, Zhang, Nguyen, & Olson, 2015). Wider horizontal bands represent greater contributions made by a writer. At the top of the chart, information on when writers accessed and edited the file is provided. The bottom features a numeric chart including four contribution characteristics, each measured in number of characters: (1) the number of edits made to one’s own writing, (2) the number of edits made to

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy Vol. 0 No. 0

2

Month 0000 literacyworldwide.org

FEATURE ARTICLE

May 27 09:18

May 26 10:00

May 25 09:09

May 23 09:09

Figure 1 DocuViz: An Information Visualization Chart

0 1,000 2,000 3,000 4,000

6,000 7,000 8,000 8,890

Rev Length (characters)

5,000

Name

Total

Edit of Self 5198 5643 6031 16872

Edit of Other

623 787 518 1928

Total Edit

5821 6430 6549 18800

Contribuon

3192 2670 3028 8890

Note. © alphaspirit/Shutterstock.com. The color figure can be viewed in the online version of this article at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/.

independent and collaboratively written texts (Arslan & Şahin-K ızıl, 2010; Strobl, 2014), whereas others focused on different collaboration patterns between groups (Wang, 2016). Still others have studied how online discussions contribute to text quality improvements (Yeh, 2014). To investigate the synchronous writing patterns of undergraduate students in relation to text quality, quantity, and style, Yim, Wang, Olson, Vu, and Warschauer (2017) analyzed 45 coauthored Google Docs files. Most notably, a collaboration style in which work has been equally distributed (i.e., divide and conquer) tended to produce stronger texts than a text predominantly produced by one or two main writers. Documents marked by balanced participation and active editing predicted better writing quality. Of note, synchronous collaborative writing does not improve text organization, suggesting that a displacement of responsibility may negatively affect a text’s logical structure. Additionally, groups who proactively and

Readiness Anchor Standards for Writing ask students to “use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others” (p. 18), and the eighth-grade ELA Standards for Writing state that students should be able to “write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence” (p. 42). These standards highlight the importance of digital literacy skills in K–12 education and speak to the value of using collaborative activities while teaching argumentative writing in middle school.

Previous Studies on Student Collaboration To better understand how and why people collaborate using web-based tools, researchers have investigated how writers coauthor documents, the different roles that writers play, and the various writing strategies they employ (Lowry, Curtis, & Lowry, 2004). Some experimental studies sought to identify differences in


3


FEATURE ARTICLE

whereas these prompts were modeled after academic writing tasks that ask students to support their claims using evidence exclusively from the source material. By providing students with preselected source material, we were able to control the texts’ complexity and save time that would have been spent on searching for sources.

comparably contribute at the beginning and edit the document collectively produce stronger texts (Wang, 2016). These results reveal new insight into how undergraduates write together, specifically, and the learning affordances of cowriting in general. Yet, we wondered how online synchronous collaborative writing might benefit eighth graders.

Classroom Procedure

Our Methods

Four eighth-grade ELA classes were randomly assigned to either the experimental group or the active control group. The experimental group wrote their first essay collaboratively at time 1 and their second essay independently at time 2. The active control group wrote independently at time 1 and collaboratively at time 2. We randomly assigned students to their collaborative writing groups at the classroom level. Prior to writing, students were provided with reading instruction on the source material. This instruction included multiple reads and progressively increased what students were responsible for doing over time (Fisher & Frey, 2014). During writing, students had equivalent class time (i.e., four 50-m inute class periods) to complete each essay using a classroom mobile device. Students engaged in prewriting activities (i.e., developing an outline), drafting, and revising of both their coauthored and independent essays using Google Docs. In-class discussions were limited to more accurately test the effects of online collaboration on writing outcomes, which improved the internal validity of this study. Students received online scaffolding in several ways: They could observe their group members compose in real time, use the Comments function to ask writing questions, and use the editing tools in Google Docs. Each collaborator could also check the DocuViz output chart whenever necessary.

For the present study, we completed data collection over four weeks while Mr. Frank’s students completed two source-based argumentative writing activities using Google Docs. Our data entail 85 source-based, argumentative essays (i.e., 21 essays cowritten by groups of three or four students and 64 essays written independently) and student survey data. The study took place during the 2015–2016 school year in a U.S. rural Title I public school in a district designated by the state as in need of improvement. Fiftythree percent of this district's students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, 51% were female, and 7% belonged to an ethnic minority group. Mr. Frank’s four ELA classes were composed of students with mixed abilities, including general education students, high-ability students, and students with identified learning disabilities. Our focus was on the writing effectiveness and length of two source-based argumentative essays written by Mr. Frank’s eighth graders (n = 64). We were also interested in students’ perceptions (n = 45; 70% response rate) of their group-w riting experience. We note that the brief length of this study and the limited number of writing activities may limit the generalizability of the results.

Our Focus on Source-Based Argumentative Writing Source-based argumentative writing is a sophisticated form of academic writing (Olson, Matuchniak, Chung, Stumpf, & Farkas, 2017), which aligns with the grade 8 Common Core State Standards for Writing (NGA Center & CCSSO, 2010). Given this and Mr. Frank’s goal to expose his students to this genre, it was a natural fit to design two source-based argumentative essay activities for this study. Each writing activity comprised a text set written by authors with differing perspectives on a central issue, a writing prompt, and guidelines for argumentative writing. The source texts were purposefully selected because their content and complexity were appropriate for most of Mr. Frank’s eighth-grade students. We note, though, that writers often draw from their own experiences and opinions when supporting their claims,


Measuring Student Writing Three measures of writing served as dependent variables in this study: the rubric scores, essay length, and grade- level text complexity. The selection of these measures stemmed from our interests in understanding whether and how collaborative writing benefits middle school students and whether the experience of online collaborative writing transfers to their later independent writing.

Rubric Scores. The essay-scoring team consisted of a university graduate student with experience in teaching high school English, community college-level composition, and developmental English courses and a college composition instructor with extensive experience in

4


FEATURE ARTICLE

mean difference on these same variables. Finally, we tested for differences in the benefits of writing in a group first versus writing independently first, as this initial writing experience relates to students’ later writing outcomes. We used the constant comparative method (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2013) to code, categorize, and identify patterns in the open-ended student survey data.

teaching secondary-level English and specialized remediation courses for struggling readers and writers. Both scorers (and all of us) have years of experience in assessing student writing together. This experience was leveraged when using this familiar writing rubric. The scorers blind-scored each essay using a 6-point rubric that features four genre-specific writing traits: content and analysis; command of evidence; coherence, organization, and style; and control of conventions. The minimum score possible for each essay was 6, and the maximum score was 24. The rubric score reconciliations were within the acceptable 1-point range (Office of State Assessment, 2016), so a third scorer was not required.

Results Writing Better Together To address our first research question, we looked for whether differences existed between all group-w ritten essays and all essays written independently. The short answer is yes. Middle schoolers benefit from certain advantages when writing collaboratively in terms of writing effectiveness and length. On average, the source-based argumentative essays written in groups outscored independent writers on overall rubric scores (t = 3.13, p