Our new strong research interest is: school education!
Because we feel that the Romanian educational system needs university and expert research.
We have started conducting groundbreaking research in topics such as reading and writing in pre-university settings. First fruit is already visible. And more is to come in the next years!
One of the articles which was quickly published is: A Linguistically-Informed Assessment Model for Multidimensional Competence Building in Romanian School Writing.
For this article, we created a corpus of Romanian language and communication textbooks approved by the Ministry of Education, for three relevant grade levels: 4th grade, 8th grade, and 12th grade. We investigated which writing assignments can be found in these textbooks.
The results were shocking:
- There is a prevalence for writing assignments a of the three highest levels of Bloom’s taxonomy in all three cycles (primary, secondary and high school education) so no gradual competence building is observed throughout textbooks;
- For the first two cycles, students are intensively asked to write creatively (unstructured compositions);
- In the final school year (12th grade), a shift is observed towards more structured texts (e.g. essays). However, textbooks introduce theory but neglect the stages of understanding and application;
- Overall, a general lack of guidance and progressive steps towards more complex writing tasks is observed in all textbooks.
The conclusion is that, while writing requirements are at the highest level, the writing competence building is almost completely missing in textbooks. So students are left alone to acquire the writing expertise requested for final examinations.
Further research is needed to compare textbooks for all grades and accredited Editing Houses and to see how writing assignments correlate with national curriculum per grade level.
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