“Projects for Change”: Collaboration and Engagement in a Mandatory College Writing Course
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research investigates some of the challenges faced by college students in a mandatory writing course, primarily the challenge of engagement in such courses given students’ perceptions of English and writing, of the relative unimportance of these courses in comparison to their program-specific courses, and the institutional practices that exacerbate these issues. It aims to investigate the impact of collaboration and group work on “projects for change”, or projects intended to impact meaningful change on social, cultural, and/or community issues. The study uses a practitioner inquiry lens, as my own classroom was the site of the research. Using a variety of data collection methods as well as a variety of data sets, including a teacher journal, student surveys, student journals, audio recordings, and student-created media, the study provides a narrative overview of the class of 33 students and the journey they went through to develop and implement their projects for change. It then looks more closely at four groups in particular, in order to explore the range of students’ experiences of this work, as well as to draw some conclusions about the common challenges all groups encountered. While the expectation was that these projects would provide a new avenue for student engagement, the experience yielded more complex results, in that those students who displayed commitment were able to create opportunities for change, but not all students took up the invitation as enthusiastically, to the point that some even seemed to disengage as a result of their feelings towards the class and the project overall. This practitioner research revealed that transformative projects are worth pursuing, with the understanding that not all students will engage with this type of learning opportunity. For the instructor, change projects are challenging to implement, given their immersive nature, given the limitations of the college setting, and given the demands required of both students and faculty. The benefit is in the rich and engaging learning experience that comes from pursuing various creative projects for change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.059 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.022 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".