Education Commons^™

Measuring Student Success In Jour200a: Fundamentals Of Editing & Reporting I: A Beginning Writing, Editing And Reporting Class, Jessica Fargen Walsh

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

A grammar error or typo on a resume can mean the difference between getting the job or having your resume deleted. Factual errors and inconsistencies can also affect a writer’s credibility. Accuracy, style, word choice and consistency matter for these reasons and more. Journalism students in particular should come to internships, classes and jobs with the skills they need to succeed. The course Jour200A: The Fundamentals of Reporting & Editing I attempts to meet this demand by providing all majors in the College of Journalism and Mass Communications with a strong foundation in editing and writing. This project sought to …

Jour200a: Fundamentals Of Editing And Reporting I — Teaching Lede Writing For Digital/Print, Broadcast And Social Media Simultaneously, Chris Graves

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

Fundamentals of Editing and Reporting I is a foundational course required for all majors in the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. The first half of the course focuses on grammar, AP style, determining how to identify news and good editing. The second half of the course pivots to applying those principles in writing by focusing on teaching students how to summarize news facts, write them in an inverted pyramid news writing style for digital/print publication and also for broadcast and social media platforms. There are key differences in writing for various platforms …

Empower: An Adaptable Writing Intervention, Carly Dinnes

The Nebraska Educator: A Student-Led Journal

EmPOWER is a six-stage writing intervention designed by speech-language pathologists to improve the expository writings of school-aged children with language learning and executive function disabilities. The intervention uses scaffolded instruction to transform struggling students into independent and self-regulating writers by training the students to use a variety of supports (e.g., graphic organizers, checklists) and strategies (e.g., referring back to the writing prompt) throughout the writing process. Many key features of the EmPOWER approach to writing instruction directly support components described in cognitive models of writing, which indicates that EmPOWER is a theory-guided writing intervention that may benefit a wide range …

Fostering Eabcd: Asset-Based Community Development In Digital Service-Learning, Rachael W. Shah, Jennifer M. Troester, Robert Brooke, Lauren Gatti, Sarah Thomas, Jessica E. Masterson

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

The continuing expansion of digital service-learning is bringing emergent dynamics to the field of community engagement, including the challenge of fostering asset-based views of community partners in online spaces. “Online disinhibition” (Suler, 2004) can prompt harsh critique or insensitive language that would not have occurred during face-to-face relationships. Traditionally, the field of community engagement has drawn on asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993), which calls for relationship-driven, asset-based, and internally focused partnerships, to encourage ethical and positive interactions with community members. However, this theory was not originally intended for digital, text-based interactions. This article explores how aspects of asset-based …

Adpr 221: Strategic Writing For Advertising And Public Relations—A Peer Review Of Teaching Benchmark Portfolio, Michael D. Hanus

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

The objective for this course portfolio was to document the changes implemented to a core advertising and public relations writing course. The portfolio outlines five proposed goals for the revised course: students should be able to write for an audience, give and receive quality feedback, prepare for novel situations in the workplace, see writing as rewarding, creative, and fun, and learn professional conventions and industry standards for strategic writing. The course was significantly restructured in order to better reach these goals on student assignments, activities, and during lectures. Each goal was assessed with a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. …

Engl 254: Writing And Communities—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Rachael Wendler Shah

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This course portfolio analyzes a section of English 254: Writing and Communities, exploring how well the course met individual teaching goals and the departmental course goals for English 254, with a particular focus on how the new English Department mission statement priorities are actualized in the class and how well the class supported learning to communicate across difference. The portfolio includes an outline of institutional context, course outcomes, and student background, as well as a backwards planning chart that demonstrates alignment between outcomes, activities, and assessment strategy. Then, the portfolio examines student data from each of the three major assignments, …

What Does Motivated Mean? Re-Presenting Learning, Technology, And Motivation In Middle Schools Via New Ethnographic Writing, Justin Olmanson

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This article offers a critique of the way middle schoolers are often positioned as generalizable objects that can be acted upon to produce measurable increases in motivation and learning. The critique invites a reconsideration and cultural analysis of some of the dominant discourses and perceptions of technology, young adolescence, and the study of motivation. The use of New Ethnographic Writing—a method that performs a cultural critique via extended scenes—connects to the roles and status of motivation, technology, and educational research methods deployed within public schools. Coupled with weak theory, this approach offers a way to understand young adolescents as navigating …

Visualizing Revision: Leveraging Student-Generated Between-Draft Diagramming Data In Support Of Academic Writing Development, Justin Olmanson, Katrina Kennett, Alecia Magnifico, Sarah Mccarthey, Bill Cope, Duane Searsmith, Mary Kalantzis

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Once writers complete a first draft, they are often encouraged to evaluate their writing and prioritize what to revise. Yet, this process can be both daunting and difficult. This study looks at how students used a semantic concept mapping tool to re-present the content and organization of their initial draft of an informational text. We examine the processes of students at two different schools as they remediated their own texts and how those processes impacted the development of their rhetorical, conceptual, and communicative capacities. Our analysis suggests that students creating visualizations of their completed first drafts scaffolded self-evaluation. The mapping …

Using Embedded Institutes As Professional Development To Create A Culture Of Writing Excellence, Melanie K. Farber

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The following thesis addresses the problem of creating a culture of writing excellence at a large, urban school. I will show how the Embedded Institute model helped our school to reconsider our professional development model and to create writing leaders across the content areas. The thesis will make the argument for something larger than test scores through qualitative feedback from teacher participants.

Adviser: Robert Brooke

The Writing Process: Using Peer Review To Develop Student Writing, Jennifer M. Troester

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The following thesis will explore how peer review through an online writing exchange influences student writers during the writing process. I propose that when students participate in this online writing exchange to peer review, it will assure that they will have a better understanding of the writing process, and more confidence in analyzing their own writing and in themselves as writers. It also makes these students more conscientious of the writing they share with peers because they have a wider audience than just their teacher, and this motivates them to improve their writing. The last part of the document features …

Caught In The Tractor Beam Of Larger Influences: The Filtration Of Innovation In Education Technology Design, Justin Olmanson, Fitsum Abebe, Valerie Jones, Eric Kyle, Lyrica Lucas, Katie Robbins, Guieswende Rouamba, Xianquan Liu

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

While emerging technologies continue to emerge, research into their use in learning contexts often focuses on a subset of educational practices and ways of using technologies. In this study we begin to explore the extent to which educational designs are influenced by larger societal and education-related factors not usually explicitly considered when designing or identifying technology-supported education experiences for research study. We examine patterns within and between factors via a content analysis across ten years and 19 different journals of published peer-reviewed research on technology-supported writing. Our findings have implications for how researchers, designers, and educators approach technology-supported educational design …

The Techno-Pedagogical Pivot: Designing And Implementing A Digital Writing Tool, Justin Olmanson, Katrina Kennett, Bill Cope

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

In educational technology, the idea of innovation is usually tethered to contemporary technological inventions and emerging technologies. Yet, using long-known technologies in ways that are pedagogically or experientially new can reposition them as emerging educational technologies. In this study we explore how a subtle pivot in pedagogical thinking led to an innovative education technology. We describe the design and implementation of an online writing tool that scaffolds students in the evaluation of their own informational texts. We think about how pathways to innovation can emerge from pivots, namely a leveraging of longstanding practices in novel ways has the potential to …