Improving Expository Writing Skills of Preservice Teachers in an Online Environment
This paper describes an experimental exploration of special procedures used in a game-like online expository writing experience that was designed to help preservice language arts teachers develop descriptive writing skills. Participants were asked to describe a target picture within a picture set to their cohorts in an online discussion in order for the cohort to correctly identify the target picture. Cohorts’ responses provided feedback about the effectiveness of participants’ descriptions. It was predicted that participants’ descriptive text would improve over repeated trials by having received this feedback from their cohorts. Qualitative and quantitative research methods were used to analyze writing samples.
