Students write poorly when they don't know what they're talking about.
It's not that they're bad writers. It's that they're trying to write about something that they don't understand. Or they're trying to make stuff up.
So maybe the lament "They can't write!" should be modified to "They're not ready to write!"
Evacuation roots
5 hours ago
1 comment:
I completely agree -- which is why writing is such an important way for philosophy to assess learning.
Sure, there are plenty of grammatical errors and a bit of struggle with organization, but generally bad papers are because they don't know what to say.
There is a very close parallel to teaching logic -- if the student understands the method and rules, they'll be able to do any proof -- they'll know what to write down. This is why I have such an extreme distribution on the first proof exam -- about 5/35 fail badly, the other 30 score above 90%.
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