Evaluating the effectiveness of a writing intervention for first-year, ‘at-risk’ students

ABSTRACT

Lecturers working specifically in the field of academic literacy, often find themselves designing interventions in the hope of further developing their students’ academic reading and/or academic writing, often within a very limited time frame. This article is based on one such writing intervention carried out with students who were shown to be ‘at risk’ by a compulsory measure of academic literacy. In attempting to evaluate the model used here, this article will use a pre-test-post-test design by drawing a comparison of the marks students received for both assignments, as well as the marks students received for the two main dimensions of the scoring rubric used by the lecturer in both written assignments. Important as well is the need to determine whether the writing process engaged in here has had any positive impact on students’ marks.

Keywords:

• academic literacy
• academic writing
• peer-evaluation
• tutor
• tutor-assisted learning
• writing intervention
• writing process