Results from this study showed that students usually write different types of texts (Lindberg et al., 2020, submitted) for the development of a complete understanding of the subject matter. Students’ writing is motivated by the development of knowledge and understanding of a subject matter, but also for study achievement and future professional development and support.
Based on the analytical questions from NLS and the procedure from the thematic analysis (Table 1) the following themes were discerned based upon the questions: what do students write, how do students write, and for what purpose do students write?
Table 1
Overview of themes related to significant analytical questions (AQ) within New Literacy Studies (NLS).
AQ1: What do students write? |
T1: Professional vocabulary | Concepts and/or descriptions |
T2: Core content | Teacher accentuated content |
T3: Clinical examples | Content related to clinical practice |
AQ2: How do students write? |
T4: Multimodal accentuation | Strategies to accentuate content and relations. For instance, color coding, arrows, drawing pictures, pictures and images, upper case letters, tags, visual symbols |
T5: Synthesis | Students combine PowerPoints from lectures and individual notes, including a presentation comprising a general and detailed structure, usually performed on a computer |
AQ3: Why do students write? |
T6: Mnemonic strategies | Knowledge and understanding |
T7: Academic purposes | Exam-preparation |
T8: Professional purposes | Professional knowledge and support; a) clinical skills as student and dentist b) the development of professional literacy |
What do students write?
Three recurrent themes were identified in relation to what students write. The students wrote complementary text that comprised of: T1) professional vocabulary; T2) core content; and T3) clinical examples. Complementary text included information exceeding what was presented in the PowerPoints. Examples of the complementary text were teacher examples that related to the content in the PowerPoint, for instance clinical examples that vocationally or clinically contextualized teaching and learning content. For instance, Student 3 noted a simile provided by the teacher where Posselt’s trajectory was compared to the shape of a banana. Student 3 argued that additional information provided by the teacher during lectures, supports memorizing, and is therefore noteworthy.
Professional vocabulary, i.e. concepts and descriptions, involved the simplification or description of terminology or other phenomena in accordance with students’ individual and everyday language. An example was that Student 3 added the verb ‘movement’ for further describing ‘exaggerated protrusion of the mandibula’. The same student also added ‘goes back and forth’ to describe the terms ‘protrusion’ and ‘retrusion’.
All three students discerned core content, i.e. central, recurrent and accentuated (e.g. intonation) content by the teachers during lectures. An example from all three students was the word ‘toxic’, another was ‘pain’ and ‘peripheral sensitization’ that were accentuated by the teachers. Another example described by the three students was the repetition that patient anamnesis was a significant source of information for treatment.
Clinically relevant content was provided to students based on teachers’ experiences, i.e. examples from their clinical practices. Teacher-examples were occasionally further supported by drawings on the whiteboard. Students copied these drawings into their own notes (Fig. 1).
How do students write?
Two themes were discerned in relation to how students write, and these were: T4) multimodal strategies; and T5) syntheses. Multimodal strategies that students used aimed to support memory, and to aid their understanding of the subject. Strategies comprised of various color coding; accentuation through different types of markings, such as squares, bolding and exclamation marks; arrows marking movement or leading to various descriptions; drawing own pictures, or adding pictures and images for further explanation of content in text; upper case letters; tags; visual symbols for instance marking female and male gender. For instance, Students 1 and 3 used black color as basic color for noting, while other colors signified different things (Fig. 2). Student 2, on the other hand used red color for marking words, concepts or other information that needs to be further controlled and thus clarified as an adequate explanation that was not provided in the lecture itself. After the lecture, all three students either looked up in books, searched the internet or called a course-friend to ask. Student 3 also used yellow highlight to mark something important, while pink highlight to mark concepts and terminology.
Student 3’s synthesis comprised of a multimodal combination of PowerPoint-handouts from lectures, additional teacher information from lectures summarized in Word-documents, and students’ individual complementary handwritten notes on tablets, referring to specific page on PowerPoint-handout (Fig. 3). All three students often complemented the notes with a synthesis soon after the lectures, as a mnemonic strategy to increase the chance of remembering details from the lecture. The student synthesis was a structured summary of the subject, in terms of both general and detailed information. These syntheses helped the students to reach a broader and deeper understanding of the subject.
Why do students write?
Three themes were identified for the question of why students write: T6) mnemonic strategies; T7) academic purposes; and T8) professional purposes (Fig. 1). Students notetaking as a mnemonic strategy, was presented by all three students as clarifications of vocabulary, examinations, diagnoses as well as procedures, to helping the three students to relate different information to each other. Thus, the three students connected different parts of a subject to create a holistic understanding of the content.
Also, all three students used the notetaking and constructed syntheses to pass their exams and thus explicitly to achieve the learning objectives set for the educational programme. According to all three students, notetaking was an essential part of preparing for examinations. They emphasized that notetaking requires understanding of what is noted and understanding of how and why things are connected within a subject.
In terms of professional purposes, the three students interviewed expressed an awareness of the literacy related demands in the dentist profession. Thus, they all considered reading different types of texts and writing as part of a professional development and highly relevant as preparation for their future profession as dentists.