Spreadsheet Activity
Topic Description
- Student Writing Improvement Tracking: Review and Reflection
Learning Objectives
- Analyze data from a spreadsheet.
- Incorporate data into a written paper.
- Analyze improvements in the student’s writing process.
Goals
This lesson will take place near the end of the semester. The goal of this lesson is to have students re-review feedback comments that their instructor added to their assignment documents in each Module, review a Student Writing Improvement Tracker spreadsheet they used during the semester to track the number and types of writing errors that they made in each of their assignments, and discuss, reflect upon, and write about their progress in improving their writing over the course of the semester. They will include the data they collected during the course of the semester in their paper.
- This lesson’s lecture will include a summary of the types of errors (with bad “before” non-examples and improved good “after” examples) that were provided at the beginning of the semester.
- Students will review their Student Writing Improvement Tracker spreadsheets and note which errors they made the most often, and which of those they were able to reduce in their writing between the beginning of the semester and the end.
- Students will use the data in their spreadsheets to create a chart showing the data visually represented directly in the spreadsheet.
- Students will participate in a discussion (using the Discussion Board) with their classmates and instructor, discussing and comparing their findings, why common writing errors are made, and how to help prevent them.
- Students will write a paper reflecting on their progress since the beginning of the semester and how they feel their writing skills have improved. They will provide examples of the types of writing errors they made the most at the beginning of the semester, how they revised them, why they think they were making those errors, what they changed in their workflow and writing process in response to instructor feedback about errors in their writing, and how those changes have helped them learn to reduce the number of errors in their writing.
- In the paper, students will include the data that they have collected so far in the semester from their Student Writing Improvement Tracker spreadsheets, and their chart. In the spreadsheet, on the “Assignments / Errors” tab, Cells A4-A8 describe the assignments the students will review. and cells B2-J2 describe the types of writing errors. The data the students will collect will come from cells B4-J8. Cells B9-J9 show the totals of the columns of errors per type of error. Cells K4-K8 show the totals of the rows of errors per assignment. Cell K9 shows the total of errors all semester.