Brief Daily Writing Activities and Performance on Major Multiple-Choice Exams
Rent from DeepDyveSome educators have proposed that the goals of general education relate more to the development of thinking skills than to the mastery of specific subject matter. For example, Warren (1979) claims that the goals of general education should focus primarily on building skills in the analysis and synthesis of concepts. Warren describes analysis as involving both accurate distinctions among concepts and synthesis of concepts. The combination of the two skill areas contributes to building a network of ideas within an academic domain. Warren contends that brief intellectual tests can be used to assess students' ability to make precise distinctions among concepts and synthesize those concepts into a coherent framework.
More recently, Stearns (2002) has proposed that a priority in general education is to promote critical thinking—often conceptualized in terms of the match between evidence and conclusions (Facione & Facione, 1994). Stearns also sees a need in general education for making intellectual connections, especially with respect to the exploration of seminal domains such as human nature. He affirms that "the ultimate goal of general education is engagement and improvement in fundamental ways to identify and analyze intellectual problems (including finding, evaluating, and using factual information), rather than a factual coverage approach" (2002, p. 45). Most recently, Glynn, Aultman, and Owens (2005) have claimed that "contemporary general education should be designed to develop in students the habits of mind that will facilitate their understanding of critical issues" (p. 151). Among the habits of mind advocated by the latter educators are critical thinking and problem solving skills.
The context for the current study was a human development course that explored such important areas as physical health, [End Page 221] cognitive problem solving, psychological well-being, the maintenance of social relationships, and the achievement of humanitarian values. However, simply exposing students to such domains will not accommodate the goals of general education. Students must regularly participate in the analysis and synthesis of these issues by addressing questions such as the following: How do the most salient concepts within a domain differ from one another? What do they have in common? How do the concepts affect one another? The current study involved a daily compare-and-contrast writing activity that required students to answer these questions about pairs of developmental concepts, presumably contributing to the analysis and synthesis of pivotal ideas in human development.
If analysis and synthesis are integral to general education, then these cognitive processes should be reflected in exams in general education courses. Many college instructors who teach broadly based courses in general education are searching for ways to improve undergraduates' performance on exams requiring a high level of cognitive networking (e.g., Aiken, 1982; Clegg & Cashin, 1986; Fuhrman, 1996; Karras, 1978; Morrison & Free, 2001; Wallace & Williams, 2003). Presumably, one approach for accomplishing this goal would be to increase the quantity and quality of students' conceptual analyses of course content during class on a daily basis. Such analyses can best occur when students use time outside of class to become acquainted with course concepts. Otherwise, much class time will be devoted to explaining basic concepts. Only well-informed students can engage in the compare-and-contrast analyses and syntheses necessary for differentiating and integrating a course's most relevant concepts.
Whether students spend time outside of class familiarizing themselves with seminal concepts in a course depends in part on in-class instructor actions. In-class actions that may affect the out-of-class study of course concepts include the following: assigning specific portions of reading materials for each student to discuss in class (Tai-Seale & Thompson, 2000), requiring students to write questions related to assigned readings (Kerkman, Kellison, Pinon, Schmidt, & Lewis, 1994; Shaw, 2001), and requiring students...
