Extending the Principles of Intensive Writing to Large Macroeconomics Classes

Abstract

The authors report on the design and implementation of a pilot program to extend the principles of intensive writing outlined by W. Lee Hansen (1998), Murray S. Simpson and Shireen E. Carroll (1999) and David Carless (2006) to large macroeconomics classes. The key aspect of this program was its collaborative nature, with staff from two specialist units joining forces with two economics instructors to provide students with significant resources and direction in a short program of writing, embedded within an intermediate macroeconomics subject at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). The objective was to test potential strategies and to identify points of improvement for a more intensive program of writing development at the next stage of implementation. The authors review the literature on student writing and associated assessment issues, outline the central design features of the UTS program, and take a closer look at the centerpiece of a strategy for overcoming writing problems: a series of writing workshops targeted at two related assignments within the intermediate macroeconomics course.

Keywords:

• assessment
• embedded programs
• expectations
• student writing

JEL codes:

• A20
• A22

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Bill Becker, Gordon Menzies, Ruth French, participants at the Teaching and Learning Forum in the Faculty of Business, University of Technology, Sydney, participants at the 12th Australasian Teaching Economics Conference, University of Western Australia, July 2006, and two anonymous referees for comments and suggestions. They also thank the Faculty of Business, University of Technology, Sydney, for funding support.

Notes

1. The University of Technology, Sydney, is the oldest of a group of technology universities in Australia but is much younger than the Australian sandstone universities, which were established in the mid-1800s. It became a university in 1988, having been a technology institute for many years before that. It was reorganized in 1990, absorbing a series of smaller technical colleges with histories dating back to the 1890s.

2. There were nearly three standard errors between the two means. But great care must be taken in interpreting differences between the performances of these two cohorts because students selected themselves for attendance at the workshop series. Such differences might simply reflect differences in motivation, ability, or some other unobserved factor that simultaneously explains both differences in grade and attendance at the workshops rather than the effect of the workshops on grades.