I have been teaching a Year 3 unit on the MSc Cosmetic Science course for the past four academic years which is assessed by a time-limited exam, mostly based on case studies and long form answer questions.
I identified early on that, due to the disruption and change on the learning and teaching methods used caused by COVID-19, the students in the first two cohorts I taught lacked the skills of long form writing and synthesis of knowledge in fully formed sentences that is necessary when assessed in a traditional type of exams or report writing. The students were more comfortable answering questions in a list format, rather than connecting multiple pieces of information to create longer, more complex sentences, as in many cases in-person exams at the early stages of the pandemic were replaced by machine markable online questions.
To help prepare the students for this, new-to-them, way of writing , I used the unit’s seminar provision to focus on long form writing workshops – this was not something that I had encountered before at this level, as these skills are usually acquired in earlier years of further and higher education. During these seminars, I would often give the students a specific time limit to write the most coherent full sentence/paragraph they could to answer a question, without the use of lists. The sentence/paragraph did not have to be the full answer but the students had to focus on cohesion and formatting of the sentence.
From a skills perspective, the seminars seemed to be successful in familiarising the students with this approach to answering questions in coherent sentences and not lists; but what I noticed that the seminars had an even greater impact on, was the students’ stress levels.
When the students began their third year of studies, it was almost implied and expected by the wider teaching team and myself that they would have these skills, despite not having been directly taught – which caused a major stress response to a wide percentage of students within the same cohort, seemingly not correlated with the individual student’s abilities, previous grades or native language.
Interestingly, studies have shown that the COVID-19 disruption and online delivery did not have a significant impact on students learning, neither on academic writing skills nor on skill-based anxiety (Nappu et al., 2022; Kawabata, 2022) but rather showed that self-efficacy beliefs were relatively more important as they pushed students to find resources that would aid them to perform well (Talsma et al., 2021).
I believe that these seminars inadvertently showed students that they could actually answers questions using more complex sentences that showed their ability to synthesise their acquired knowledge (rather than using lists of information to outline their knowledge) by strengthening their self-efficacy beliefs. Using the time-limited ‘answer in the best way you can’ approach in a low-stakes, informal environment, allowed the students to practice their writing skills and make mistakes over and over again. As their self-efficacy belief grew, they gained the confidence to try different approaches to structure sentences and the understanding that there is not one correct answer, but rather that a question can be answered in different ways with all of them being correct if they contained the correct information.
Moving forward, I aim to implement exercises in all units I am involved in that strengthen the students’ self-belief as a tool to help them move towards being independent researchers that can seek the correct resources needed to succeed in any task that they are faced with.
References:
Kawabata, D. (2022) The influence of COVID-19 and online delivery on reading and writing skill-based anxieties in Japan. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10092/103636
Nappu, S., Dewi, R., Hasnawati, H. and Hamid, R. (2022) ‘The Effect of Online Learning on Academic Writing Course During Covid-19 Pandemic’, VELES Voices of English Language Education Society, 6(1), pp. 247–257. doi: 10.29408/veles.v6i1.5220.
Talsma, K., Robertson, K., Thomas, C. and Norris, K. (2021) ‘COVID-19 Beliefs, Self-Efficacy and Academic Performance in First-year University Students: Cohort Comparison and Mediation Analysis’, Frontiers in psychology, 12, pp. 643408. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.643408.