Exploratory Writing (Low-Stakes)

"Low-stakes" writing offers opportunities and experience of writing as a practice for thinking through content/concepts/reasoning specific to the substance of a course. Research has shown that much 'poor' writing is less a consequence of lack of ability to write than a lack of understanding of subject matter and lack of experience with discourse practices in particular settings and, at the university, in the disciplines. Giving students opportunities to write during learning something rather than only, or mainly, after learning something, encourages risk-taking and critical thinking since it focuses on reasoning and concepts rather than on the technical aspects of writing.

A low-stakes writing activity can 'count' in the grading distribution without being 'evaluated' directly for its success as a product. Since this writing is constitutive of aspects of the course, it should count - thus assigning some portion of the 'grade' to doing it - which means being there and participating in the learning and doing it in ways to enable learning - offers students an indication that it does matter to do it, that it's important to the instructor because it's given time and is counted, and it is not busy work. If it were the case that the low-stakes writing was as naturally part of the learning as sitting and copying notes from the overhead, it might not be necessary to assign it a value in the grading. We usually don't give a grade for taking notes, for instance. But when low-stakes writing is first introduced, it is not yet natural and not habitual. It takes time and effort to plan and to perform and it is integral to the way in which material is learned and taught.

Writing during lectures This is a great way to incorporate low-stakes writing, and works well for both larger and smaller lectures.

One minute paper