sometimes teachers need increase enhance the motivation to write articles in college students and how can do it, in your opinion.
Dear Vahid,
I'm not sure exactly what your context is, but generally I would recommend:
- Each student having a writing buddy, preferably someone who is a little more experienced
- Get your students to speak out their writing goals
- Only ask students to write when they have something to say
- Have a target they can aim for, such as a writing competition or an internal magazine
Hope this helps.
Undergraduate education does not explicitly mention the capacity building in research, as graduate students are supposed to. However, why not to show the younger students where knowledge comes from, and how to build it further?
This year, in dealing with a new topic (e.g. environmental & psychological effects of building height) I distributed specific research topics to groups of 3 or 4 students. During the class, I asked every student to find an article and read it. After one week, every one was asked to report it to the group and, in the next week, the groups were asked to hold a 10-minute presentation. After one month, everyone had presented. I then asked every one, individually, to write a text on a related, encompassing topic. Text length was limited to one A4 page and figures and references on another page.
The result was quite good. I could perceive a real interest for the subject.
The student has to be interested in writing. He/she can get a mentor or a role model besides the lecturer. The University should have in-house journals, newsletter, bulletin, magazine etc where only articles from students are allowed and cash prizes offered to great writers.
Students and young people have a wealth of different forms of media open to them as a result of which it is not necessarily apparent to them that writing is a vital part of the toolkit that they should be developing. This has been exacerbated by the increasing tendency to use multiple choice questions and short responses rather than full essays in school education. This has left many young people ill-prepared to write well argued texts, but it cannot be the role of universities to teach writing to all students, however we can and should offer ample opportunity to write.
In an ideal world, all young people would be confident in their writing ability to enable them to present their research (or reports in the business world) with confidence and ease. Thus, I agree wholeheartedly that we should encourage writing from a young age. I would also suggest that we are failing our children if they have not mastered the "three Rs" (that is, they should be able to read, write and perform arithmetic) by the time they apply for university.
Writing research papers is a step beyond the academic essay and tends to be something that we all need to work at before we become proficient. An appreciation of the importance of considering the reader (or the eventual audience), can be developed through writing (and speaking) exercises that are meaningful to the present generation: "Write the outline for a short video explaining [provide the subject] to a non technical audience"; accompanying this exercise with questions for discussion, like: "How would you modify your transcript if you were presenting the same subject to experts in the field?"; "How would you adapt this information for presentation in a paper to be published in an academic journal or for a newspaper?", and "What do you consider to be the major challenges in presenting technical work to the general public?" Developing an awareness of the need to think of the reader as well as the information to be presented is one step on the path to becoming a good writer. In addition, many skills are transferable from one form of media to another, so alternative exercises like producing videos and giving talks to the class can be beneficial for structuring written texts. As a final thought, I would suggest that today's students are masters of media, having been immersed in it in a way that we were not as youngsters, so there is an argument for listening to what young people have to teach us about communicating with them!
The motivation to write the essays could be
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Academic Journals