Conquering Essay-Phobia: Sometimes, All It Takes is a Fresh Approach

“I hate essay tests. I never know what to write!” Many of our students would concur with these discouraging sentiments. If given a choice, most children would probably lobby for multiple choice or true/false alternatives over the chore of writing an essay answer. Essay questions strike students as much more work, and many of them are at a loss as to how they should proceed during these portions of a test.

February’s column described the Question Dissection protocol, which provides students with a guideline for analyzing essay questions. The next stage in preparing students for essay tests is to introduce strategies that provide guidance for organizing knowledge into a coherent essay answer.

The Strategy

Essay exam writing should be treated like any other skill that students need to develop. Teachers cannot automatically expect students to know how to create appropriate responses to essay items. Classroom strategies for improving student essay writing include the following steps:

Step 1: Begin by focusing on the functions essay items play in assessment. Elicit from students ways that essay items require thinking that is different from objective items. Your list may include the following attributes of essay writing:

• Students usually have to produce information from their memories with few prompts, or perhaps none at all.
• Students are asked to use information, rather than merely recall what they’ve learned, as they formulate their answers.
• Students are often asked to clarify their understandings of a concept, to draw conclusions, to make generalizations, to perceive connections between facts.
• Students have a greater opportunity to express their personal understandings of important material.

These attributes can be summarized by noting that essay items ask students to demonstrate their thinking as well as display their knowledge.

Step 2: Next familiarize students with the variety of question types that will be encountered on essay tests. Typically, students do not know the specific questions for essay exams ahead of time, and they may not even have prior knowledge of the topics about which they will be asked to write. Initially, as you prepare students, it is therefore helpful to provide them with an essay question in advance of the test. Use this opportunity to analyze the kinds of thinking suggested by different question verbs:

• Identify Similarities and Differences – show how things are alike or not alike (compare, contrast, distinguish).
• Outline a Cause/Effect Relationship – tell how or why something happens or happened (explain, relate, interpret, discuss).
• Support an Argument – use information to back up statements or ideas (criticize, evaluate, defend, justify, prove).
• Organize Details and Examples – use language to help visualize something (describe, illustrate, define).

Step 3: Model for students how to “fact pack” their responses to a target question. What information, what terms and details, should be cited in a complete answer?

A word association web is an excellent stimulus for generating those key terms for an essay answer. For example, students in a World History class might be given the following essay question: “Contrast the lives of the nobles with the peasants during feudalism.” As students work with partners to brainstorm terms that occur to them when they think about the topic of “feudalism,” their word association web might feature: fief, castle, allegiance, protection, knight, vassal, thatched hut, farmer, France, rent, artisan, famine, jousting, chivalry.

Once a web has been completed, students now have some prompts for answering the question, and they have a visual reminder of information that should be integrated somewhere into their essay. As they consider the test verb (contrast), they can began to do a quick sort of terms which are characteristic of the nobles vs. the peasants. Starting to write begins to look like a less forbidding enterprise.

Step 4: As students become more practiced in responding to essay items, some additional strategies can help them continue to improve their preparation and organization. Have students predict the topic areas that might be featured in an essay question for the next test, and have them work with partners to write possible essay questions. Student-generated questions may actually “make the cut” and be placed on the next exam.

Another preparation technique is to allow use of notes for the essay portion of an exam. For example, the topic of an essay question might be provided in advance, and students can be permitted to bring to the test all the notes they could write on a 4x6 index card. This encourages them to scout for key terms and ideas ahead of time, and provides a focus to their study.

At times you may also wish to supply the test verb for the essay question, so students can brainstorm possible questions about the topic that might include that verb.

Advantages

Allocating instructional time for guiding students into writing successful essays will lead to a more directive and positive attitude toward essay responses on tests. In addition:

• Students are encouraged to see connections in the material, rather than approaching study as mere memorization of facts.
• Students are engaged in upper level thinking processes, such as supporting arguments or recognizing cause/effect relationships.

Posted February 28, 2000