Blair Winograd

I will be working with the University of Michigan M-Write initiative that incorporates writing-to-learn pedagogies into university wide gateway STEM courses.  Writing-to-learn engages students by asking them to write about science topics, to interact with one another through peer review, and to learn through a revision process. While research widely supports the benefits of writing and peer review in the learning process, writing in large gateway courses amasses a corpus of essays for which educators cannot quickly provide feedback.  The M-Write initiative strives to build a digital toolkit supporting the application of writing-to-learn pedagogies at scale. I am working with M-Write to combine conceptual writing prompts, automated peer review, natural language processing, and automated personalized feedback to create an infrastructure for writing at scale. This will expand the use of content-focused writing activities to engage students in course material and thereby increase their comprehension of key concepts.