GROOM to be successful and self-regulated writers

By Lim Li Qing, Rathna Raghesh and Crescendra Chong

English and Literature Department, Naval Base Secondary School  

Why do my students make too many content errors despite me going through several rounds of deconstructing the question for writing? When would they take responsibility for the numerous language errors that they make? How do I teach them to be more independent and self-regulated? What is the real issue? Are the assignments cognitively demanding for my students? These are some mind-boggling questions that run through our minds as we go through stacks of marking. As educators, how do we reverse the onus and responsibility such that teacher dependency is minimised and student responsibility is increased in Formative Assessment and feedback? This topic has become a constant discussion point during English Department meetings and many strategies have been tried and tested through the years – from getting students to familiarise themselves with marking symbols to getting the peers to do annotations to teachers giving detailed comments. However, year after year, we constantly find ourselves grappling with the same problem of a lack of reciprocation especially for essay writing. The Gradual Reduction Of Our Mistakes (GROOM) focuses on giving students responsibility that is accessible but is limited to what they can act on. It is the first step to self-regulation, of which three aspects are key (Zimmerman, 2022):   Firstly, planning involves tasks, setting goals, outlining strategies to tackle the task, and/or creating a schedule for the task.  Secondly, monitoring puts plans into action and closely monitors performance and experience with the strategies used. Thirdly, reflection. After the task is completed and the results are in, the student reflects on how well he/she did and why he/she performed that way.  

GROOM is about student monitoring and accountability. It increases students’ capacity to not just eliminate errors but to taste success and self-regulation in writing. 

Theoretical Underpinnings 

Using Zimmerman’s (2002) Self-Regulation in Education, the three aspects of self-regulation were considered. Namely, they are: planning, monitoring and reflection.  

Our strategy 

The department embarked on a journey to make feedback-giving more student dependent and easily digested. Our aim was for students to be able to identify their own errors made, rectify them, and reduce dependency on the teacher. Underlying this aim was the importance of ensuring that students are not overwhelmed cognitively and would be motivated to act on the feedback. Hence, we decided to introduce the use of an enhanced checklist. It was hoped that the enhanced checklist would help students realise their language gaps – language accuracy, verb forms, tenses and punctuation. With this realisation, it would lead to their desire to self-regulate and an undertaking to improve their writing skills. We created an enhanced checklist to be used for Situational Writing, which students can either use individually for self-feedback, with an option for peer-feedback or it can be used by a teacher to give a student feedback on their work. We created different checklists tailored to the different writing tasks, as well as ability levels.  

Using Zimmerman’s (2002) three domains, the enhanced checklist served as a pre-meditated feedback checklist as it enabled students to use questions to plan their writing, monitor their performance by using the evidence column as they address their different learning gaps and reflect on their learning. 

Secondary Four Express – Formal Letter Writing 

Secondary One Normal Technical – Informal Letter 

Our Findings We found that the use of the enhanced checklist was most useful for mid-readiness students to check and regulate their work. This group of students were able to pick out errors made in their essays and rectify them based on the guidelines provided in the enhanced checklist. The enhanced checklist served as a handy tool for students to be reminded of certain text features necessary in a Situational Writing task. Additionally, students made use of the checklist to attempt to elaborate further on their given points, a task which requires both analysis and evaluation of their written work. This enhanced checklist thus served as a self-directed tool students can easily use, with little to no teacher guidance.  

Pre-intervention: There were numerous spelling errors  

Post intervention: Spelling errors were minimised 

With the mid-readiness students, in order to gain efficiency, technology was harnessed to work with them to identify and correct their mistakes without having to rewrite the whole draft.   

There was clearly a reduction in spelling errors, verb forms and articles. 

However, for the high-readiness students, the enhanced checklist was not seen to be effective. For this group of students, they did not need a checklist to remember text structure or language features. The checklist became an unnecessary layer of checking. It was observed that there was barely a difference in the work submitted with and without a checklist. This group of students were able to apply and make connections to what has been taught previously and produce a piece of work that hits most of the task requirements. In this case, the checklist, which can be more routine-like, does not help this group of students extend their thinking to develop more sophisticated and eloquent points.  Individualised teacher feedback that aims to stretch thinking could prove to be more useful when dealing with students of a higher-readiness level.  

Similarly, the checklist proved to be ineffective for the low-readiness students as well. Many of them struggled to break down the different components in the checklist and were simply ticking the boxes without any real thought. We found this to be especially true for the Normal Technical students, where it was observed that students would either tick the boxes in the checklist even though they had not incorporated that specific feature, or they would put a cross in their checklist and attempt to rectify their mistake incorrectly. For this group of students, teacher guidance is crucial and one-to-one support may be the most effective way in helping students learn better.  

Conclusion

Ultimately, the effectiveness of a checklist depends on the objectives one wishes to achieve, as well as the profile of the student. If the objective is to remind students of certain ‘fundamental’ elements that make up a piece of writing, the checklist could prove useful. However, the checklist may not serve its purpose when attempting to provoke thinking in students. Neither is the checklist useful if the information presented is too cognitively overwhelming.  

As a department practice, we will continue to incorporate the use of tailored checklists to help students become more self-directed. This will be coupled with individualised feedback and additional support for different groups of students. For the high-readiness students, a cognitive stretch in the task may lead to self-regulation. For the low-readiness students, pitching the task at a cognitively accessible level would motivate them to do more with less. For the mid-readiness students who have reaped the most benefit from the enhanced checklist, their learning gaps have been addressed. Hence, there is optimal success for everyone. Ultimately, our aim is for students to engage more deeply with their work through feed-up practices.