Making report writing ‘active’
Dr Wendy Garnham
What is the idea?
This chapter will present the active report writing project that I have been using with students studying my foundation year module on Social Psychology. Report writing can often be seen as a “dry” and formulaic exercise. Making report writing more of an active endeavour, that empowers students to be more creative and innovative underlay this project.
Why this idea?
When we ask students to conduct research and write a report on it, we tend to give them a question, give them instructions for how to conduct the research, how to write it up etc.- it is all tutor led with very little option for students to show their creative potential or to tailor the report to their own interests. Moreover, in assessments of this nature, students often leave it until the last minute to complete it, meaning the mountain of meltdowns set in. This project enables students both to invest their own creativity into the assessment and also breaks the task down into manageable chunks across the term, with each chunk linked to a formative feedback opportunity. It allows students to learn by doing, encourages them to seek support and implement feedback to help them develop as independent learners.
How could others implement this idea?
The active report writing method follows five key steps: Conversation in the café, Sling your hook. Down the Rabbit Hole, Playing Detective and Be a Rembrandt.
1. Conversation in the café – idea generation
Students are initially introduced to the assignment brief: to conduct a content analysis. For the first step, students should select an area of the module syllabus that interests them and then generate as many different questions about that as they can think of. What questions do they have about that area? What do they think would think, it would be interesting to explore? They are encouraged to talk to friends and family, to share their ideas and to imagine a conversation in a cafe. If they were talking about the area of the syllabus that interests them, what questions might their friend raise? How would they respond and would they themselves have any question to raise for their friend in return? The emphasis is very much on generating ideas. Whether or not these are ideas that they take forward for the final analysis doesn’t matter at this stage. Towards the end of this stage, students individually document their flurry of ideas in a conversation collage which can be as creative as they like.
2. Sling your hook – hooking evidence to ideas
Students look back at their collage and select one of the questions they generated to take forward for their content analysis. It must be a question that can be tested using content analysis. Their task is now to explore the literature to find out what is already known about the content of that question. What has already been done? Where are there gaps in our knowledge? The idea is that students aim to “hook” evidence onto their ideas. Stude