Collaborative Essays: A Way to Improve Writing

Abstract

Utilizing collaboration as an educational tool for the first time may very well produce confusion for the educator who wishes to integrate it into a writing course because of the vast number of terms and definitions. Therefore, this thesis categorizes collaborative writing into three basic areas: interactive, cooperative, and coauthored. It is hoped that educators may initiate one or more of these types of writing into their classrooms as a way to improve students' writing. These three categories of collaborative writing are defined, several methods of applying them in the classroom are presented, and some of the problems inherent in this type of writing are discussed with possible solutions. A comparison of essays was conducted, using the scores of students both when they wrote alone and when they were engaged in the cooperative type of collaborative writing. The data results indicate that a significant difference does exist between writing in isolation and composing in a community-based environment. The mean score of the grades students received on the essays they wrote alone was significantly lower than the mean of the grades on the group essays. Therefore, it is concluded that collaborative writing can be effectively utilized in the classroom because it can result in higher essay grades. In addition, there are results that may not have even been considered such as interpersonal skill acquisition by the students who collaborate on their writings.