Exploring of individual writing trajectories within a large text-corpus in primary school
Submitted by:
Jesper Bremholm
Abstract:
Despite the growing importance of writing as a resource for learning and participation in contexts both in and out-of-school, our knowledge of writing development is quite incomplete. This regards in particular knowledge of the developmental trajectories that students pass through as they encounter and grapple with the complex system of more formal writing in the primary school years (Bazerman et al. 2017). In the research project Automated Tracking of Early Stage Literacy Skills (ATEL, 2018-2023), we collect texts from young students (aged 6-8) from 13 schools in Denmark during the first three years of primary school (> 50.000 texts). An essential objective of the project is to develop proficiency scales for early writing development, as this is trackable in young students’ computer-based writing using a book creator app that is widely used in Danish primary schools (Bremholm et al. 2022). These proficiency scales are a precondition for the overall goal of the project, which is to implement an automatic assessment of young students’ writing development in this app, and to provide the teacher with pedagogical feedback (Kabel et al., in process).
In this paper, I propose to present a sub-study of the ATEL project. Our aim in this sub-study is to deepen our knowledge about student writing seen from a growth perspective and to contribute in-depth insights about individual writing trajectories. In order to being able to follow individual students and explore their writing trajectories, we conducted a selection process spring 2022 through three steps:
First, we chose nine Year 3 classes from nine of the participating 13 schools (one class from each school). All nine schools are from the same Danish mid-size municipality. Choosing Year 3 classes enabled us to collect all texts written by the students in the book creator app, from their first year of formal schooling in 2018 (Year 0) and until autumn 2021 (Year 3).
Second, we conducted an automatic scoring of all the included student texts written during the school years 2018-2021, using the algorithms developed in the ATEL-project (Christensen et al. in process). The scoring gave an overview of students’ writing development in each of the nine classes.
Third, based on the scores for each class, we selected three students from each class: two that exemplified typical writing trajectories in the specific class, and one that diverged from the typical patterns. This resulted in 27 case students.
Hereafter, we aim to conduct in-depth analysis of all texts written by these students. The analysis is done using the analytical categories of the framework used to establish proficiency scales (Kabel et al., 2022), but in this sub-study we also pay specific attention to the semantic linguistic features that were difficult to include in the coding of the large sample, among other things, students’ ways of establishing cohesion and interpersonal meaning.
In the paper, I present the results of our analysis, examples of writing trajectories illustrating both typical trajectories in the different classes and divergent trajectories.
References
Bazerman, C., Graham, S., Schleppegrell, M., Applebee, A. N., Matsuda, P. K., Berninger, V. W., Murphy, S., Brandt, D., & Rowe, D. W. (2017). Taking the long view on writing development. Research in the Teaching of English, 51(3), 351–360.
Bremholm, J., Bundsgaard, J., & Kabel, K. (2022). Proficiency scales for early writing
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identification of linguistic features for tracking early stage literacy.
Kabel, K., Bremholm, J. & Bundsgaard, J. (2022). A framework for identifying early writing
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