iWRITE Web-Enabled Software
(Interactive Writing Tutorial Environment)
Notes for Course Instructors, September 2010What It's For | Looking at iWRITE | How It's Used: Course Sites to Look At
New Functions, Future Plans | Using iWRITE in Your Course?
Preparing the Content for Your Course Site | Credits
What It's For
iWRITE is web-enabled courseware developed at the University of Toronto by Margaret Procter and colleagues to support the use of written assignments in courses across the disciplines. Each iWRITE site is course-specific so that it gives relevant and credible advice. By showing samples of past student papers along with detailed instructor annotations, iWRITE sites demonstrate the qualities of structure, coherence and style expected in written work. The course grading criteria are included for viewing at any time. An interactive module (the Prompter) can be created to take students through the process of planning and drafting their next papers.
iWRITE is based on a study of the challenges and best practices identified in Arts and Science writing initiatives. It has also been shaped by ongoing testing with students, teaching assistants, and course instructors in real teaching and learning situations. Sites have been developed for over 30 courses at U of T, York, McGill, Nipissing, and Loyalist College.
We work closely with instructors to create sites that combine attention to style and organization as well as the content of the discipline. We also seek out comments from students about the usefulness of the sites for their needs. Student responses to the online questionnaire also guide ongoing development and revisions.
iWRITE programming has gone through several design updates, changing its interface to create more choices for structure, display, and interaction. It is now coded on PHP language for maximum flexibility. U of T students are now authenticated through their UTORids, meaning that sites can be fully integrated with Blackboard and the portal without requiring a separate login. The online Manual guides administrative users through the steps to set up and maintain their own sites.
The main developments in iWRITE as an instructional tool have come from instructors' inventive adaptations for the specific needs of their classes. The examples described below cover a wide range of subjects and types of writing, and a spectrum of instructional aims. Instructors' creativity in using iWRITE continues to expand the possibilities for its use.
Looking at iWRITE
We invite U of T faculty members and teaching assistants to view some of the course sites we have developed so far and to consult us about the possibility of creating iWRITE sites for their own courses. Visitors from other universities are also welcome. To obtain a temporary guest account to look at some of the course-specific sites described here, write Margaret Procter. Then go to http://iwrite.utoronto.ca and use your account to look at selected sites. Follow the onscreen instructions and use the navigation bars to move around and explore. Please fill out the Questionnaire that is part of the software, using the write-in boxes to give us your comments and suggestions from an instructor viewpoint.What iWRITE Does
iWRITE can't teach writing in itself, but it can help you make the most of the written assignments you include in your courses. It aims at showing students what you expect -- not just telling them. And it has the advantage of being online and allowing for self-directed and sometimes interactive learning.
An iWRITE site displays real work done for your course, along with your comments on that work. Students have already heard the generic advice about writing. Seeing the ways you apply respond to actual work in your course is an effective way to get to them to pay attention.
The core idea is based on the apprenticeship principle (e.g., Lave and Wenger, 1991; Bandura, 1997), the idea that people learn by seeing credible examples of others' work and then by attempting the activity themselves. The two main components of iWRITE enable these stages of learning:
- Students first see genuine samples of student writing from previous sections of the course (shown with the authors' consent), along with instructor comments and grades. A popup box outlining the course grading criteria is available on any screen through a link on the top navigation bar. Most examples are of excellent or good work, with a few pieces chosen to exemplify common misunderstandings or flaws. We can also create links to popup boxes for "mini-lessons" on writing techniques mentioned repeatedly in the comments.
- Students may then go to a Prompter section to try out what they've seen in the samples. guided by a sequence of instructions and input boxes. Some courses (e.g., SSC199 and APS111/112) give step-by-step instructions to create a draft or outline, often simply by taking the assignment prompt and breaking it into stages. (Students tell us this presentation gets them to read the assignment instructions attentively -- sometimes for the first time.) Other courses (e.g., SOC203) take students through an idea-generating exercise, aiming to enrich their thinking in preparation to drafting the next assignment. Students can email their Prompter draft to themselves for further development.
How It's Used: Course Sites to View
Humanities Essays | Social Science Papers | Science Writing | Professional Writing
Humanities Essays
Incoming students in particular tend to arrive with inadequate ideas of the university essay. Seeing successful examples of student work in a variety of modes helps to convince them that the five-paragraph formulaic essay isn't enough, and that they should (and can) write analytically rather than descriptively.
- ENG185, a literature course in the Academic Bridging Program at Woodsworth College, draws students who have been out of school for some years or lack the standard secondary-school entry qualifications. For these underprepared students, the site displays a variety of literary-analysis papers on poetry, drama, and fiction, and it also shows exam answers that display the tight organization and concise style needed for timed in-class writing. Some students are afraid to look at samples, but those who do express fervent gratitude for the reassurance and stimulus the iWRITE site provides. iWRITE use is strongly correlated to success in the course.
- NMC101 is an introductory course in Near and Middle Eastern history. The sample essays on this site are based on guided research reading; the extensive and helpful comments focus on critical thinking and use of sources. Instructors say this site made a noticeable difference in the quality of student writing. In its first year of use, the class average for the second essay rose 10%. Sites for NMC278 and NMC343 show other types of reading-based writing in this department.
- John Browne's HUM199_Rings course makes extensive use of iWRITE along with Blackboard, and 100% of students use the site each year. Instructor comments on the sample papers for this First-Year Seminar on Lord of the Rings focus on clarity and accuracy of analysis. The site contains multiple sets of Samples and Prompters, made available in sequence according to the stage of the course. The Prompters stress the need for thorough preparation of the chosen topic, including the art of asking questions and previewing a range of possible answers.
- Barbara Rose's site for her first-year seminar course on villains in literature (HUM199--Villains) offers stringent and good-humoured advice to help students avoid common pitfalls in style and tone. "Don't Make These Mistakes" is the title of one group of Samples. It offers short striking examples of common flaws in writing about literature -- storytelling instead of analysis, sweeping generalizations without adequate support, poor use of quotations, etc.
- The NipissingEnglish site is the result of several years of discussion among English faculty at this small Ontario university. It shows a variety of papers on different types of assignments, with a range of instructor comments: in one case, one set from one instructor and another set from another. The papers on theory and on poetry are particularly sophisticated -- and contentious.
Social-Science Papers
- John Browne's site for SSC199 initiates students into the art of arguing about public issues, in this case the Canadian healthcare system. Comments on the sample Issue Papers give running "marginal" comments, using bold font to note each argumentative move in the paper and correlate it to the numbered points on the assignment sheet. The highlight function lets students see the argumentative structure of the sample papers. The Prompter for each assignment takes students through the steps of planning and presenting their own arguments.
- Jack Veugeler's students in SOC203 write repeated short papers responding to readings in sociological theory -- not an easy task for students who are unpracticed in dealing with such abstract texts and uncertain about the way to approach critical reading. Here the wealth of examples (now 20 in total) demonstrates that students can approach this assignment in many different ways, for instance by applying ideas from the reading to contemporary phenomena or personal experience, by making a comparison with other authors or approaches, or by closely analysing the assumptions and reasoning of the reading The clear concise comments for these papers appear in the same structure as the grading sheet used by TAs in the course. The Prompter offers questions to stimulate ideas and suggests ways to develop them, and can be used repeatedly for the different readings. Students like the site and use it heavily. Note the way the samples are grouped by approach rather than by topic.
- Inspired by the SOC203 site, Josee Johnston of the UTM Sociology Department has set up a site for her courses on Globalization (SOC236and237). Students also write many short response papers, and some have trouble recognizing the range of ideas in the set readings. A popup checklist on avoiding "narcissistic" thinking is framed as guidance in analysing the set papers, but also applies to one of the most common weaknesses in student work, that of responding in terms of one's own original position on the topic without taking full account of the ideas in the reading.
- GGR314 incorporated more attention to writing as part of curriculum renewal in Arts and Science. This site shows samples of essay exam answers and offers tips on constructing them efficiently.
Science Writing
Large Biology courses have made good use of iWRITE, often in situations where there is very little chance for direct writing instruction, and where inconsistency among TAs who grade the assignments can be a problem.
- The extensive sites for Clare Hasenkampf's large first-year Biology courses at UTSC, BGYA01 and BGYA02 show a set of increasingly complex lab reports, and incorporate more detailed comments on each sample than any TA could give individual students. Each assignment has its own Prompter to guide students through the aspect of scientific thinking being emphasized at that stage of the course. The material for this extensive and handsome site was assembled and mounted by Farzana Siddiqui, a third-year undergraduate student working on a Co-op project in summer 2003. The sites are not currently available for student use. However, course TAs sometimes ask for access so they can study the comments as models of helpful analysis of student work.
- BIO150, a prize-winning course coordinated by Corey Goldman, has set up a site for its 2000+ students to show what finished work for a short Ethical Issues paper (building on tutorial discussions and oral presentations) might look like. The five papers show varying types of success with this assignment, and the instructors' comments give firm clear direction in the art of reasoning well from scientific evidence. More than 80% of students in the course use the site, averaging about 12 visits each, and their comments are very enthusiastic. Course TAs note that they receive far fewer anxious questions about the assignment, and that work is easier to grade because students address the basic requirements of the paper.
- BIO240 is a new half-course in Fall 2008. The iWRITE site shows examples of the only written assignment, a scientific paragraph asking for a very concise synthesis of basic information about a key lab procedure used in current research. The extensive comments guide students around likely pitfalls.
- BIO250 was a core Biology course with nearly 1500 students in the Winter session and a smaller Summer section. It created the first iWRITE site and used it until the course was retired at the end of Summer 2008. You may still want to look at the samples showing students specific types of scientific writing. For the Spring assignment now on display, the very detailed comments focus on the technical demands of setting out experimental evidence in clear precise prose and well-designed figures. Over 90% of students typically used the site. Their comments noted appreciation for the warnings about common errors as well as the examples of good work.
- The site for BIO349, a large third-year class in Molecular Biology, shows examples of short literature reviews ("mini-reviews") that will build toward students' group presentations of their PBL projects. The "Peer Review" component was developed for this course, supported by a special grant from the McGraw-Hill-Ryerson Foundation. It lets students upload their drafts, then distributes the papers among a pre-defined group or four students, asking students to comment on each other's work. TAs can monitor the student exchange, add further comments, and then grade the quality of each student's peer-review comments as well as their literature-review assignments. The annotated samples on the "mini-review" papers thus provide models for the literature-review assignment itself and for the art of commenting succinctly and helpfully. NOTE: To see the various stages of the Peer Review function for iWRITE, go to the Default Text site and follow instructions.
- The GEOLOGY site shows a very brief lab report from GLG112. Charly Bank uses it to show his students how and why to make their scientific writing clearer and more cohesive. Based in part on the given/new scheme of text coherence from Linguistics theory, the Criteria box includes a detailed breakdown of the marking scale for a very brief assignment, and the home page contains a concise lesson on style to which the comments relate. In 2009-10 this site will be developed into a repository of material that will be useful to students in several Geology courses involved in the current departmental writing initiative.
Professional Writing
Students who need to write in specific forms or modes can learn readily from sample pieces, especially when accompanied by comments. A number of sites have found distinctive ways of adapting iWRITE to their students' needs.
- ADMS1000, an Administrative Studies course at Atkinson College, York University, shows short exam answers based on case studies. Students write trial answers for the Prompter exercise before participating in small-group interactive workshops run by the Atkinson Writing Centre. See elso the ADMS1000_JR site for a new version set up by Professor Julia Richardson to focus on the types of critical thinking desired in exercises and exam questions for her course. Her comments point out instances where concision is a special virtue. In 2009-10, all sections of the course will use this site.
- An introductory journalism course at Loyalist College (LoyalistWriteEdit) shows instructor-created samples one by one and provides a running commentary about expected stylistic patterns in press releases (short paragraphs, use of abbreviations) and common flaws (too-broad topic definition, spelling errors). Students enjoy the sly humour in the examples. The popup box "Thoughts on Becoming a Good Broadcast and Internet Writer" balances the box "Don't Make These Mistakes."
- DOC211, Determinants of Community Health is a core course in the second-year M.D. program. For several years now, one module has been taught by specialized librarians. To extend their few direct contacts with the students, they developed this site, providing helpfully annotated samples of research questions and search strategies to show the difference between those that get projects off to a good start and those that cause problems from the beginning. Before iWRITE, 25% of students in the course received failing grades on this assignment; iWRITE helped bring the figure well below 10%.
- Four sites pertain to writing in the Engineering profession. Engineering Strategies and Practices (APS111and112) is a new first-year required course integrating attention to Engineering design principles and to communication in Engineering. It won the national Alan Blizzard Award last year as a model of collaborative teaching. The sample papers on its iWRITE site show students the sequence of written messages they will use in their design planning with real-world clients, starting with simple emails and ending with a full-scale set of design specifications. The many groups of samples and comments display various stages of constructing design "specs" (Conceptual Design Specifications, or CDS), and the 15 Prompters guide students through the thinking and writing involved in each stage. Two other sites, one on Abstracts and another on the fourth-year thesis written by Engineering Science students (ESC399), also focus on specific genres of Engineering writing and the activities involved in completing them. Alan Chong has studied his Engineering Science students' response to a new site for ESC201, where students must write critiques of published papers. High use correlated to success in the course; the best results came when students adapted rather than copied the samples' structures for their own purposes.
New Functions, Future Developments
Besides celebrating the harmonization of iWRITE with Blackboard, so that students in U of T courses no longer need to log in to their course sites separately, we are anticipating new uses based on the increasing awareness of writing pedagogy shown by course instructors at U of T and elsewhere. The current writing initiatives in Arts and Science particularly will lead to more course sites, and no doubt an increasing number of sample types and prompter exercises. Course sites already display considerable range of design choices, such as the following:
- Prompters can take many different forms, as shown by the range of current exercises. APS111and112 has 20 Prompters for different stages of the cumulative assignments in the two half-courses. One course created a Prompter that serves as a guide on avoiding inadvertent plagiarism, and I am open to suggestions for creating others with a focus on specific skills or strategies. These too could be useful in more than one course.
- You may use our Questionnaire function to create quizzes, with answers collected onsite for course instructors to evaluate.
- Large sites, such as the ones for APS111and 112 and for HUM199Y_Rings, and sites designed for use by several related courses, such as those for Nipissing English and Geology at U of T, make good use of the Groups functions. That lets you show a variety of samples for different types of course assignments, and let you make them visible or not according to the stage of the course.
- On the other hand, sites with a smaller number of samples (e.g., BIO150) can show papers one by one instead of in groups, enabling users to return easily to individual papers that they want to study more closely. You may want to try that option for some or all of your samples if you have only a few on your site.
- Popup boxes displaying mini-lessons have proven useful in several sites. BGYA01 developed one on the use of the passive in science writing (visible at . The Loyalist WriteEdit site shows Andy Sparling's note on good broadcast writing as a "bonus," demonstrating its own advice about energetic concise writing. APS111and112 recently changed a Prompter on the Executive Summary into a popup checklist that students can access from within iWRITE or from their word processor. Other topics for such mini-lessons might include tricky details of referencing or punctuation, ways to label items in a table or figure, or the characteristics of a good argumentative thesis.
iWRITE is available for still more challenges and extensions. You are welcome to contact Margaret Procter to discuss using iWRITE with your course.
For Your Course?
We encourage you to consider using iWRITE for your courses or programs if you can say yes to some of these conditions:
- Your students need detailed but flexible guidance on what is expected in written assignments for the course.
- You vary assignments from year to year, but ask for the same kinds of analysis and reasoning.
- You can present samples to serve as guides, not rules or templates to be copied.
- Your TAs or co-instructors would benefit from seeing examples of clear, concise and helpful comments on student pieces linked to coherent statements of grading criteria.
- You are interested in measuring the effects of teaching practices on your students' learning outcomes.
U of T instructors may contact Dr. Margaret Procter to discuss applying iWRITE to their courses. I can advise on the design of your site and the choice and development of material. Our online Manual is an essential guide to the process of setting up the site and creating the online content.
All use of iWRITE at the University of Toronto is free of charge. We have signed a small number of licensing arrangements with other postsecondary institutions, and will consider such arrangements with other Canadian universities on a limited basis. For the moment, we are focussing on educational use only.
Preparing the Content for Your Course Site
To get your site underway, you (or your experienced TAs) will need to complete at least the first five steps below. If you have used student samples previously in your teaching, you may be nearly ready to start with. In most cases, you will be preparing an iWRITE site for a future course, but it is also possible to set up iWRITE in an ongoing course -- for instance, to give extensive commentary on sample papers from assignments being given back to the class.
- The main step is to collect appropriate samples of student written work. We recommend looking mainly for good papers that will encourage students to emulate their strengths, rather than papers that serve solely to display common errors. Students tell us they feel discouraged and disrespected by seeing mainly poor or mediocre work -- but they also say they appreciate being warned off common pitfalls. To avoid having students think of the samples as templates (thus constricting their own efforts), we also strongly recommend showing a variety of examples: papers demonstrating different approaches and styles, and papers that take risks in attempting interpretation or organisation of material.
- To be sure that we are treating students fairly, we follow the U of T ethical guidelines for research involving human subjects. That means obtaining the informed and voluntary consent of the students whose papers you want to display, and assuring them of anonymity and security in the use of their papers. Several sample consent letters are included in our Manual. We will adapt these for your course on request.
a. To facilitate collecting material from current students, we recommend distributing consent letters to all students in the class. That way individuals do not feel singled out or excluded. The letter promises that instructors will not know who has signed or not: that is, that students should not feel pressure to sign. You can seal the envelope into which students drop the forms and send it to Margaret Procter for safekeeping. Make copies during the year of student work you might want to use. Then after the course is over you can retrieve the forms and check which of your samples match the consent forms.b. If you are collecting material from past students, or requesting consent for material you already have on hand, you can simply write or call the students to request the use of their work under the conditions described in the consent letter. The letter can be mailed out afterwards or incorporated into an email message. If you want to avoid any sense of possible pressure, you could ask someone else to perform these inquiries and collect the responses.- The papers need to be in electronic form in one of the standard word-processing programs or in simple text format. Students can often send you their files for this purpose, but sometimes it is necessary to have the papers retyped. (We can offer some assistance with brief papers.)
- Another key task is to formulate comments on the papers that will make sense to readers and further your instructional purposes. The iWRITE sites described above show various ways of displaying them. You can write a sequence of "marginal" comments and then a summative comment on the paper as a whole, as in most of our sites (usually displayed with the summative comment first). Or you can write comments under given headings, as in the SOC203 site. Or you can divide the comments into strengths and weaknesses, as in the BIO250 site.
Students tell us that the main benefit of iWRITE is seeing the explanations of why certain qualities are desirable or not. Though you have more space to work with than in annotating real papers, concision is still desirable. To allow for the linking of comments and passages, focus on specific sections of the paper as examples. It is not usually necessary or advisable to point out the same quality (or error) repeatedly. Just make your one annotation pointed and convincing. I am ready to work with U of T faculty on developing and editing these comments if desired: contact Margaret Procter.- To help keep your comments coherent and consistent, and to guide students in understanding them, each iWRITE site includes a statement of expectations that pops up as an inset box activated by the Grading Criteria link on each site. You probably already have such a statement in your course outline; if not, I can help you develop one by looking at sample papers with you. A few courses have used the generic U of T grading statement, as found in the Arts and Science calendar and online.
- The Prompter section of iWRITE is optional. It is fairly simple to set up if you want to give students an exercise applying what they have seen in the samples and comments. Sometimes you can just break up your assignment prompt and ask students to respond to the components in sequence -- students have told us that this exercise shows them how useful it is to read assignments carefully. (BIO250Y does this effectively for its scientific reports.) Or you may want to suggest types of questions students could use to stimulate their planning for a future assignment. (SOC203Y works this way to encourage creative critical thinking about sociological theory.)
- The Peer Review (an exchange of papers within a small group of students) is another option. It has been used in courses where students are asked to provide feedback on each other's work in progress. It distributes the papers electronically and allows TAs to monitor and evaluate the peer reviews as part of the work in the course. Please consult further with us if you would like to consider possible uses in your course. (You can see a demonstration of all the stages within the Default_text site.)
- Now you are ready to do the inputting, or have an assistant in your department perform that work. The inputter needs only a minimum of HTML coding skills. If you need assistance in inputting your site content, please contact Margaret Procter to discuss the type of help needed. NOTE: Recent reprogramming has made the administrative functions of iWRITE much simpler and easier than previously. You can probably use it just by following onscreen instructions. The online Manual offers more detailed advice.
Credits
iWRITE was commissioned by the Arts and Science Committee on Writing (Mariel O'Neill-Karch, chair) and was further supported by the Provost's Information Technology Courseware Development Fund, 2001-2002 and 2002-2003. The Resource Centre for Academic Technology (RCAT) and Computers in the Humanities and Social Sciences (CHASS) have provided other aid.
- Margaret Procter and Robert Luke (then a Ph.D. student at OISE) came up with the original concept for iWRITE and saw through initial programming and site development. Jerry Plotnick helped set up some of the early sites and worked with Dongchuan Luo during the PHP reprogramming.
- Emitting Media created the initial Cold Fusion programming. Dongchuan Luo of RCAT revised the initial attempts at PHP programming by Shozub Qureshi.
- CHASS has provided a server and technical support since the summer of 2006. We are very grateful for the intensive revision process undertaken by Alejandro Lynch of CHASS during the summer of 2007. He is responsible for the much easier admin interface, including a WYSIWYG text editor and the integration with Blackboard and the UTORid authentication system.
- Among those who have helped develop the content for specific sites are Graham Cook and Matt Patterson, Ph.D. candidates in Sociology; Clare Hasenkampf and undergraduate student Farzana Siddiqui, Biology UTSC; Michelle French, Botany, with support from Anne Cordon and Melody Neumann, Botany; J. Barbara Rose and colleagues in the Academic Bridging Program at Woodsworth College; John Browne at Woodsworth College; Marica Cassis and Steven Shubert of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations; Corey Goldman and his TAs Ian Craine and Celine Muis Griffin of Zoology; Peter Eliot Weiss and Alan Chong of the Engineering Communication Centre, and Susan McCahan of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering; Linda Devore and Elizabeth Uleryk, instructional librarians at affiliated teaching hospitals.
- Our original inspiration was the engaging exercise on Abstracts developed by Dennis Jerz and Rob Irish for the U of T Engineering Communication Centre.
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