Make writing a daily habit: An evaluation of an educational intervention to improve writing self-efficacy among DNP students

Background and objective: Doctorate of Nursing Practice (DNP) students are trained to integrate both clinical care and evidence-based research in order to bring together science with application. However, the educational pathways in DNP programs can be problematic, especially with regards to scholarly writing. While several interventions have been utilized for DNP students, the results show that the intervention(s) used should be tailored to the specific student body being served. However, limited evidence exists regarding the effectiveness of tailored interventions on improving central concepts such as writing self-efficacy. Given these differences in the design and delivery of the DNP curricula, we created a tailored educational-writing curriculum for new DNP students at a medium-sized academic medical center in a Southern state.Methods: We assessed changes in writing self-efficacy over the three measurement intervals using linear mixed effects modeling to account for within-student clustering of writing self-efficacy scores over time.Results: Baseline scores of writing self-efficacy improved immediately after the workshop (Timepoint 2 – immediate post-test) and a full semester later (Timepoint 3 – semester post-test). However, we observed no statistically significant difference between Timepoint 2 (immediate post-test) and Timepoint 3 (semester post-test).Conclusions: We saw a significant benefit in writing self-efficacy among incoming DNP students from baseline scores. The tailored format and integration of real-life anecdotal feedback from faculty may have been fundamental to creating an increase in writing self-efficacy among students—a concept foundational to student, and possibly professional, nursing success.

Undergraduate Students as Partners in a Writing Course: A Case Study

Engaging undergraduate students and faculty as partners in learning and teaching is arguably one of the most important and flourishing trends higher education in the 21st century, particularly in the UK, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Students as partners is a concept that intersects with other major teaching and learning topics, such as student engagement, equity, decolonization of higher education, assessment, and career preparation. In this context, the aim of this presentation is to report on a case study, where four undergraduate students (hired as undergraduate research students) and a faculty/program coordinator collaborated in the fall of 2020 to review and re-design the curriculum of English A02 (Critical Writing about Literature), a foundational course in the English program at the University of Toronto Scarborough. This presentation will serve as a platform for these students and faculty to share the logistics of this partnership, its successes, challenges, future prospects, and possible recommendations for faculty and students who may partake similar projects in the future. Keywords: Students as Partners (SaP), writing, curriculum, decolonization

Show, Don't Tell: Multimodal Story Feedback in a K–1 Play-Based Writing Unit

Background With standardization ever squeezing creative curricula in K–1 classrooms, creating time for a play-based multimodal writing curriculum that leverages children's strengths as storytellers is revolutionary. Due in part to accountability policy pressures, print-based writing and verbocentric writing feedback are still often privileged in school curricula. And yet, children are natural whole-body storytellers who will be asked to write and present ideas in all sorts of forms. In order to leverage children's storytelling strengths, we need to teach writing through multiple modes: This means expanding both writing instruction and the types of feedback offered to writers in primary classrooms. Research Questions This study examines two questions: How is feedback being given, and what impact does it have on children's storytelling? How is play/storying being sanctioned? Setting & Participants The study took place in a K–1 classroom in an inquiry-based, project-based school in the U.S. Midwest during a month-long storytelling workshop unit. Participants included two co-teachers and 46 children aged 5 to 7. Research Design This qualitative study used ethnographic methods and participant observation. Data Collection & Analysis Video data were collected during workshop each day for one month, including minilessons, writing time, and share time, which is the focus of this article. Discourse analysis and a multimodality theoretical lens were used to analyze how children gave one another feedback on their stories through embodied demonstration, gesture, acting, out, or copying one another's storytelling devices. Findings Findings indicate that children's acting/embodiment, humor/parody, and copying all worked as effective forms of multimodal feedback, which ultimately functioned as teaching for developing peers’ storytelling strategies and skills. However, teachers inadvertently privileged language alone via narration, or language with demonstration in feedback sessions. Conclusions Teacher/researcher collaborations should explore ways to reimagine forms of writer's feedback that include and account for demonstration, copying, and impromptu performance and that, ultimately, open up the definition of what counts as writing at school. Um, you should work on making your story, like, real. Because, um, you're going all over the place [wiggles entire body to illustrate]—Allen, age 6

Writing as a Minecrafter: Exploring how Children Blur Worlds of Play in the Elementary English Language Arts Classroom

Background/Context Educators have considered how Minecraft supports language and literacy practices in the game and in the spaces and circumstances immediately surrounding gameplay. However, it is still necessary to develop additional conceptualizations of how children and youth's online and offline worlds and experiences are blurred by and through the games. In this study, I take up this call and examine how the boundaries of the digital were blurred by one child as he wrote in response to a standardized writing prompt within his urban fourth-grade classroom. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study Through snapshots of Jairo's writing, I illuminate how he muddled the lines between his physical play experiences and those he had in the virtual world of Minecraft. In doing so, I argue that he carried over his personal interest as a fan of Minecraft into the writing curriculum through creative language play. As Jairo “borrowed” his physical play experiences in the virtual world of Minecraft to complete an assigned writing task, he exemplified how children blur playworlds of physical and digital play in the elementary ELA classroom. Research Design Drawing on data generated in an 18-week case study, I examine how one child, Jairo, playfully incorporated his lived experiences in the virtual world of Minecraft into mandated writing tasks. Conclusions/Recommendations My examination of his writing is meant to challenge writing scholars, scholars of play, and those engaged in rethinking media's relation to literacy. I encourage a rethinking of what it means for adults to maintain clear lines of what is digital play and what is not. I suggest adults might have too heavy a hand in bringing play into classrooms. Children already have experiences with play—both physical and digital. We must cultivate a space for children to build on what was previously familiar to them by offering scaffolds to bridge these experiences between what we, as adults, understand as binaries. Children do not necessarily see distinctions between “reality” and play worlds, or between digital and physical play. For children, play worlds and digital worlds are perhaps simply worlds; it is we as adults who harbor a desire for clear boundaries.

Supporting Stranded Migrant Doctors in the UK during Covid-19 Pandemic

The British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (BAPIO) undertook a humanitarian project to come to the aid of several migrant doctors who were in the UK to take the Professional & Linguistic Assessment Board’s (PLAB) part 2 clinical examination, and had become stranded due to the lockdown during the first surge of the COVID-19 pandemic. The BAPIO PLAB stranded doctors’ project started as a serendipitous exercise in the third week of March 2020 with first a handful of migrant doctors, until it reached a peak of 267 doctors from 19 countries, and involved collaboration with multiple voluntary organisations, stakeholders, regulatory agencies and governments. There was no denying the complexity and intricacy of the demands on the stranded doctors, but it was even more pleasing to witness how the project team were more than ready to meet the challenges. Under the umbrella of BAPIO, the project team doctors, who previously had barely known each other, took on all the challenges - teaching, pastoral support, career advice, writing curriculum vitae, finding food, accommodation and funds for those in need; organising professional support, links with the General Medical Council, the High Commission of India and the U.K. Home Office. The project was concluded on 19 September, with all the doctors either returning home or making a decision to work in the NHS when conditions allowed them to. It is not possible to know how many passed their PLAB part 2 exams, but we estimated that over 50% did. The weekly virtual meetings, the camaraderie, the scale of the project, and most importantly bringing it to a closure without any major crisis, was only possible through sheer determination, understanding the needs, professionalism, leadership and excellent communication. The lessons from this project are important to illustrate the role of voluntary organisations (such as BAPIO) and the effectiveness of having established collaborative networks with official bodies and government agencies, for the future benefit migrant professionals.

Differences in Research Abstracts written in Arabic, French, and English

The proliferation of publications, mainly the digital ones, makes it necessary to write well-structured abstracts which help readers gauge the relevance of articles and thus attract a wider readership. This article investigates whether abstracts written in three languages, namely Arabic, French and English, follow the same patterns within or across languages. It compares 112 abstracts in the areas of (applied) linguistics. The English abstracts include 36 research article (RA) abstracts from an Arab journal mostly written by non-natives and 10 by native speakers from British universities. Those produced in French are 36 divided into two sets, 23 from North African journals and the remaining 13 from French journals. The Arabic abstracts consist of 30 abstracts, 15 from North African journals mainly from Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco and the other 15 from the Middle East with a focus on Qatari and Saudi texts. Results emanating from the frequency of moves show that the abstracts written in English by natives and non-natives and those produced in Arabic by Middle Eastern writers show conformity with the existing conventions of abstract writing in English. However, those from North Africa, be they Arabic or French, do not share any specific patterns which can be attributed to the language in which they are written. Further research is needed to check whether abstract writing is part of the academic writing curriculum in these two latter languages.