How can we teach social science better?

Evaluating Formative Tools for Writing in the Social Sciences

working paper

(with Sarah James, Colin Brown, & George Soroka)

While many college campuses include some kind of required, institutionalized, and universal writing instruction for their students, such programs often do not cover the specific skills, conventions, styles, and writing goals demanded by individual disciplines. This series of projects seeks to test whether a bundle of low-cost pedagogical tools found to be effective in the education literature - including rubrics, low-stakes assignments, peer review, and writing across the curriculum - can improve performance in writing specifically for the social sciences.

The most current piece of this long-term research project randomly assigns a writing rubric and a series of short, in-class instructional sessions focused on teaching and practicing individual rubrics rows, and compares post-intervention quality of student writing with a set of controls receiving usual instruction, within two large gateway political science classes. This randomized control trial follows up on a study by the same group of authors, which found that a similar rubric-based intervention can improve the specific writing skills taught in the intervention - the full paper for this earlier study can be found here.

A second follow-up study currently underway evaluates the same rubric-based intervention across three campuses - one large elite research institution, one mid-sized private research university focused on professional job experience, and one small public university - to test external validity across student cohorts that differ in demographic makeup and educational goals.

Future iterations of this research - currently submitted for grant funding - seeks to expand the intervention by testing other low-cost writing interventions across a greater diversity of student bodies - including in community college settings.